NAP Newsletter Autumn 2013

Natural Area Preservation News

Protecting and restoring Ann Arbor's natural areas and fostering an environmental ethic among its citizens. 
Volume 18, Number 3
Autumn 2013

In this Issue:

• 20 Years Later, Remembering NAP's Beginning​, by Dave Borneman, NAP Manager
• Working at NAP
• Working with NAP
• Volunteering with NAP
• Traver Creek Streambank Stabilization Project, by Molly Notarianni
• Staff Updates: Farewell...
• NAPpenings: Welcome, New Park Stewards​
• NAPpenings: Thank you!
• Annual Volunteer Apprectiation Potluck

​​​​​20 Years Later, Remembering NAP's Beginning

​​​by Dave Borneman, NAP Manager

​
November 15, 1993. My first day of work as the City’s Natural Area Preservation Coordinator. I stopped by City Hall for a “five minute chat” with my new boss, Ron Olson. On my way in, I decided to load the parking meter for one hour, just to be sure. At 9:05, I returned to my car to find my first parking ticket in my new home town - welcome to Ann Arbor! 

​I drove to my new office at 415 W. Washington, the former County Road Commission building that still stands across the street from the new YMCA. The Forestry and Park Maintenance Divisions were housed there and space was carved out for my office. One of the larger offices was split in two, creating a narrow space only about five feet wide for my office. I was led to this newly created space completely bare and void of any office furniture or even a phone, and told, “We’re not really sure what you’re supposed to do, but here’s where you’re supposed to do it!” Talk about starting from scratch!

The big issue brewing in the Parks and Recreation Department when I started revolved around a piece of property known as Cardinal Woods. It was a 10-acre block of woods and old field, surrounded on three sides by Brown Park, which has since been re-named “Mary Beth Doyle Nature Area,” in southeastern Ann Arbor. The property was owned by the Ann Arbor Public Schools, who were planning to sell it to a developer. But the neighbors were leading a coalition of forces who were asking the City to buy it as parkland instead. What to do? What was the ecological significance and value of this piece of property? Was it worth acquiring as parkland? These were the questions asked of me, the new nature guy - new to not only the City, but to all of Michigan.

Late fall/early winter is a lousy time to survey a natural area. Not only did I not know what plants were present during the growing season – which would have told me something about the ecological quality of the site. But I had no idea how this particular parcel of land compared with the other 2000 acres of parkland across the city, or any of the other vacant parcels in town.

Well, the happy ending to that story is that “Cardinal Woods” became part of Brown Park. That experience told me which direction I needed to head in developing this new NAP Program. I needed to come up to speed pretty quickly on the dozens and dozens of park nature areas scattered across the City, and I knew that the coming growing season was when I needed to do it. 

So in Spring, 1994, I put out the call for volunteers to help do plant inventories of some of the various parks. Seventy-five people signed up to help! I also hired three temporary staffers, botanists themselves, to help coordinate and train these volunteers. That effort was a huge success and started to give me, and my growing NAP staff, a better sense of where the higher quality biodiversity hot-spots were in the park system. Building on that success, we expanded the effort the following year and recruited volunteers to help us survey for frogs and toads, butterflies, and breeding birds. 

The tremendous diversity of native species in our park system was a real surprise for this Illinois farm boy, who came to the job assuming that City-owned natural areas couldn’t compare with what I had grown up with. But I was wrong! These surveys proved that Ann Arbor’s natural areas were home to a vast diversity of native plant, animals, and ecosystems. They also showed us which areas were in the greatest need of management—where rare species were being threatened by invasives, where trails were eroding away, and where the long-absence of fire was slowly killing once-diverse native ecosystems.

The rest, as they say, is history. (Twenty years of it so far.) Staff has expanded, and volunteer involvement has grown tremendously. But still, our basic approach remains the same: combine skilled staff and well-trained volunteers to identify park natural areas that need stewardship help, and work together to make that stewardship happen. 

Shortly after being hired in 1993, someone pulled me aside to remind me that there was no long-term guaranteed funding for NAP. The millage only lasted five years. I couldn’t depend on this position lasting any longer than that. What a tremendous honor it has been for me over the past twenty years to watch NAP grow from a new idea to a core part of the Parks and Recreation Department, and from a novelty in the ecological restoration community to a model for others across the nation who are interested in protecting and managing their urban natural areas. A sincere thank you to every single staff member and volunteer who has helped make NAP what it is today, and what it will become in the future. Truly, we couldn’t have done it without you! 

Working at NAP​

Working with NAP​

Citizen Science​

NAPpenings: Welcome, New Park Stewards​