With 185 acres of wetlands, forests, ravines, prairies, and Lake Michigan shoreline to care for, Schlitz Audubon has nearly unlimited need for citizen science data. As conservation efforts at Schlitz Audubon become more sophisticated, these data help drive our decision making in terms of land stewardship. The better we can understand the land, the better we can work to create healthy habitats for native plant and animal populations.
While citizen science isn’t new to Schlitz Audubon — birders have been keeping logs of every species seen on the property since 1974 — last year we took steps to strengthen and grow our citizen science efforts by increasing the number of staff-directed programs. In the first eight months, our citizen science volunteers spent more than 700 hours collecting vital population data about bats, amphibians, herbaceous plants, trees, and other species. Without these volunteers, this amount of data collection would not be possible.