Cohabiting the City with Nature

By Timothy Beatley

Increasingly, we are reimagining cities as shared spaces, places we co-occupy with abundant flora and fauna. What in the past might have been seen or understood only as a conflict — and one usually resolved to the detriment of the nonhuman species — can today be seen as the chance for coexistence, an opportunity to accommodate a diversity of species that at once enhances quality of life and introduces a measure of needed wildness into our lives. Thanks to an ongoing study, Chicago may be the first to fully understand how animals live, move, and reproduce in those environments.

Most urban wildlife studies focus on a single species for a brief period of time and occur only during the summer, but the Lincoln Park Zoo and their Urban Wildlife Monitoring Program are taking a different approach. Led by Seth Magle, director of the zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute — and one of a new breed of wildlife biologists focusing on urban nature — the research effort is shedding new light on animals within this big city.

To allow for comparison and consistent measurements, Magle and his crew laid more than 120 camera traps along three transects running 50 kilometers to the west, northwest, and southwest of the urban interior, toward more suburban neighborhoods. The photos collected from these infrared, motion-activated cameras provide snapshots of the wildlife around us, much of it nocturnal, for insights about their abundance and biology. This process has been repeated four times a year, over the course of six years, to gather data across the seasons, and it is still going strong.

Magle says the intent has been to "collect a dataset that was multispecies, that was truly long term, that gathered data in all different seasons, and that was broadly collaborative, such that we could create a platform of research sites that anyone could come in and access with us."

The monitoring network is now expanding beyond camera traps to include ultrasonic bat detectors, studies of arthropods, bird counts, and live-trapping of small mammals. It holds the promise of a much more systematic and holistic understanding of animal life supported by the Chicago metropolitan area — and beyond.

Most recently, the study has grown into a national network of sites in seven other cities and counting around the country, providing the potential to compare wildlife patterns and behavior in different places. Participating researchers use consistent methods and similar transects, the configuration of which differs from city to city, as does the number of camera traps (though each city will likely need at least 30 to ensure the statistical significance of the data collected).

Liza Lehrer, the assistant director of Lincoln Park Zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute, installs an acoustic bat monitor on Northerly Island, near downtown Chicago. The Urban Wildlife Monitoring Program posts images online via the Chicago Wildlife Watch (tinyurl.com/y8rmwmqm), where 3,500 registered users help classify more than 1,300 species per day. Photo courtesy Lincoln Park Zoo Urban Wildlife Institute.

Creating citizen scientists

Lincoln Park Zoo's efforts also include community members. Via the website Zooniverse (zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/chicago-wildlife-watch), citizens can directly participate in identifying the captured images of wildlife from the camera traps. This is essential to the study, Magle tells me: The traps have generated more than two million images, far more than his staff could ever assess or interpret on their own. And, of course, there are important community education benefits.

"We really hope to teach people about urban animals," Magle says. "How to identify them, how to tell them apart, what sorts of things live in their neighborhood."

High schools are also engaged in data collection, particularly in underserved neighborhoods. It is a chance to deepen awareness of the urban environment and to cultivate future scientists. There are now 10 such high schools participating in the program, called Partners in Fieldwork.

"We turn the high school essentially into a data collection point," Magle says, hopefully inspiring a new generation of urban wildlife biologists in the process.

Sharing the urban jungle

Magle and his colleagues are helping community members understand how to better coexist with urban wildlife — and how animals are learning to coexist with each other. For instance, the team discovered that deer and coyotes are occupying the same spaces in cities, which would not happen in more rural settings. Urban animals are remarkably savvy and able to adapt. They take advantage of the finegrained features of urban neighborhoods, Magle says. There are trees, edges, and vegetation patterns that provide shelter; an urban streambed that provides water and corridors for movement; and configurations of streets and buildings that wildlife recognize and navigate.

But what about Chicagoans? Are their views on urban wildlife adapting? Magle admits it's more anecdotal, but he does detect a change in the last several years, especially around coyotes. There's been a shift, he says, from, "How do we get rid of coyotes, they don't belong here," to "I saw a coyote. That is really cool."

"I would argue that there's been a real turnaround where people are starting to understand that they're part of the city, they're here to stay, and I think some people are starting to enjoy seeing them and knowing they live around these animals that make the city feel a little more wild."

As long as they aren't feeding on pets, that is. Magle's earlier work in Colorado revealed that human-coyote conflicts are reduced in places with prairie dog colonies — in other words, a food source beyond the family cat. I remember that work, and some of the insights about how more "urban" prairie dogs are adapting to their environments. Prairie dog colonies built near cities are dramatically denser. That makes sense, given the limited space, but they aren't suffering, per Magle. They are healthy and adapting well.

I think back to the day I happened upon a prairie dog colony near Boulder. I stood against a fence and watched, mesmerized by these busy, smart creatures. Even a glimpse of a wild animal reminds us we are not alone, that we live in complex ecosystems, and that nature is all around if we care to look. Programs like Magle's help us see cities as living places.

Can cities make room for prairie dogs and coyotes? Magle looks forward to helping planners design places where human-wildlife conflicts are minimal. Though it's still early, the insights from his monitoring program should eventually provide a wealth of guidance.

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Biophilic Cities project.