The Chicago Wilderness Ecoregion: Can we 'tone it back down' to an ecotone?

Birds chirping.  The sounds of children laughing and playing.  A monarch butterfly drifting by a small garden patch of flowers....

...Honking, shouting, a bus slamming into a pothole, and the roar of a generator from a large concrete building with two giant smoke stacks.

The sights and sounds when I cross Ashland Avenue from my quite residential neighborhood of University Village in Chicago to the industrious Illinois Medical District are quite contrasting.
This is a common scenario across the city of Chicago.  One corner will be a serene and tree-lined residential neighborhood, the next block a noisy and aggressive 4-lane highway with faded brick buildings and the musky smell of diesel exhaust.  These disorienting "hard edges" between neighborhoods are easily visible in aerial imagery, such as the Google satellite view of the western edge of my neighborhood (figure 1).

Figure 1:  The land cover of the western edge of University Village (right) contrasts sharply with the industrious Illinois Medical District neighborhood on the left.  Ashland Avenue separates the two neighborhoods.  

A hard edge between two land areas is even more visually obvious at the border of designated forest preserves and the surrounding urban environment, such as the aerial image of the southeast section of Dan Ryan Woods and an adjacent residential neighborhood on the south side of Chicago (figure 2).

Figure 2:  Border between Dan Ryan Woods and a south Chicago residential area. 

When I walk across Ashland Avenue from my quite and lush historic neighborhood into the loud and thunderous Medical District area, I can't help but feel the slightest instinct to retreat back into the calmer and shaded streets of University Village.  I also can't help but wonder if there is way that we could do things differently in this town; perhaps there is a way we can "soften" the hard edges of the many neighborhoods and land cover types found within America's third largest city.

I recently attended a community meeting where a presentation was delivered to local residents about a new luxury apartment development at the corner of Ashland and Taylor, right along that hard edge between University Village and the Illinois Medical District (figure 3).  This section of Taylor Street is the final stretch of what remains of the historic Little Italy area of the neighborhood, characterized by charming brick buildings with small shops at street level and apartments above, as well as a mature tree canopy complemented with hanging flower baskets.  The section of Taylor street immediately west was once a continuation of Little Italy, but was quickly dismantled with the construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago's development of their western campus during the 1960s and 70s.

Figure 3:  Site of proposed residential high-rise development
in University Village, Chicago

Figure 4: Architectural renderings
of a proposed apartment complex
at the corner of Ashland and Taylor in Chicago.  

I rolled my eyes a little bit as I listened to architectural consultants from a fancy downtown firm deliver there presentation on yet another expensive apartment high-rise.  But suddenly one of their slides arrested my attention.  The rendering of the proposed high-rise development had some unexpected design elements that these proud architects astutely pointed out (figure 4).  The design of the facade at street level was to pay tribute to the historic brick buildings along Taylor Street while the upper stretched of the high-rise would have a more modern design as away to "soften the edge" between the two neighborhoods.  That's it! I thought to myself.  This is the level of thinking city planners need in order to improve our neighborhoods.  

The analogy of "edge softening" reminded me of the environmental management problem of habitat fragmentation.  We can and should look to nature as way to make our urban areas healthier and more livable, as nature has important lessons for us to learn.  In particular, the "edge effect" in urban design has similar ramifications for the health of natural ecosystems, and much like there are land management methods that can "soften" the edge of a forest preserve with a nearby residential development, there are ways we can soften the edge between a quite residential block and a commercial district.

The architects of this proposed mixed-use apartment complex (which at the time of this writing has yet to come into fruition) put much thought into the design, but there are ways to go beyond mere architectural design when planning redevelopment of our communities across the Chicago Wilderness region.  First, we must look at the natural history of our region during pre-colonial times.

Close your eyes, and imagine you are standing on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in what was to become New Jersey in the year 1400, well before the first appearance of European explorers on this part of the continent.  Waves crash on the shore of a wide, sandy beach (figure 5).  We are going to gradually move west from this point.  A cool breeze from the northwest has become persistent as Autumn begins, and dried stalks of sea oats (Uniola paniculata) bend to the southeast, almost as if they are pointing the way south for migrating birds and butterflies.

Figure 5:  Coastal dune habitat with sea oats.  Outer Banks of North Carolina. 

Now start moving inland.  A small set of sand dunes will quickly give way to an expansive forest, the beginning of the eastern deciduous hardwood forest, which will envelop us on our journey west almost consistently until we reach Ohio (figure 6).

Figure 6:  Canopy of the Eastern Hardwood Forest.  Near Fairfax, Virginia.  

For nearly 500 miles, you see mature forest filled with overstory trees such as American Chestnuts (Castanea dentata), Northern Red Oaks (Quercus rubra), Butternut Hickory (Carya cordiformis) and many others.  Occasionally, a small stream or river bisects a woodland area (figure 7), which creates cooler micro habitats for Eastern Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), Rhododendrons (Rhododendron spp.), and Yellow Birches (Betula alleghaniensis).  You can't see them, but you hear the squacks of thousands of  now-extinct Carolina Parakeets (Conuropsis carolinensis) starting to make there way a little bit south for the approaching winter.

Figure 7:  A small stream in Western Pennsylvania.  

You then cross the Ohio River near what will become Wheeling, West Virginia and you must climb through several more forested hills at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains.  Then, you start to notice something in the valleys between the forested hills.  Rather than seeing a dense canopy of mixed hardwood trees, you notice small but colorful pockets of grasslands with a colorful array of prairie flowers (figure 8).

Figure 8:  Open meadow area in the Appalachian Foothills of Southern Ohio. 

As you move west into Indiana and Illinois, the land flattens out as you reach the glaciated region of the continent.  The forest opens up more into oak woodlands and savannas, and in some areas there is wide and open tall-grass prairie.  The dense cluster of oaks, chestnuts, hickories, and maples that were so pervasive in the eastern forests are now only found in small clusters near rivers and lakes.  You have reached a ecological transition point, or an ecotone, between the Eastern Forests and the Great Plains.  It's not quite forest anymore, and not quite prairie, but rather it's this colorful and diverse mix of the two (figure 9).

Figure 9:  Restored prairie near lined with native trees near the Chicago lakefront.  

The pre-settlement landscape of the Chicago Wilderness was colorful and diverse, but not boxy and patchy like it is today.  Eastern forest became savanna which became prairie in a gradual manner as one traveled westward.  With urbanization and agriculture, however, remaining natural areas have been "compartmentalized" into polygon-shaped nature reserves whose borders adhere to rigid political boundaries that previously did not exist.  Further, non-native invasive species such as European Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), which are tolerant of massive landscape disturbances, have formed tickets along the edges of and into the center of many of designated natural areas across the Chicago region.   This phenomena is known as the edge effect, where small pockets of natural areas are degraded by mass disturbance outside of their boundaries (figure 10).

Figure 10:  Small nature reserves, like this one in Northwest Indiana, are subject to the edge effect, and without intensive management often become overgrown thickets with invasive species and also suffer soil contamination.  

In order for these natural areas to even resemble their historic condition, intensive management and restoration must be (and has been) an ongoing process for remaining natural areas in the Chicago Wilderness.  But perhaps there is more than can be done outside of the boundaries of these habitat fragments; perhaps something more can be done to "soften" the edges of our remnant natural areas within a sea of urban and suburban development.

Figure 11:  Private home owners are being encouraged to
create wildlife-friendly yards through
 the Conservation@Home outreach program.  

One idea that has been employed in nearby Northwest Indiana that could potentially done on a larger regional scale in the Chicagoland area is the formation of stepping stones, where developed areas that are in close proximity to two more or nature preserves are planted with native wildflowers in order to better connect the two nature preserves.  This stepping stone method of landscaping management has been employed in some areas of Gary, Indiana through the Nature Conservancy's Karner Blue Butterfly restoration program.  Private homeowners take a vow to maintain native landscaping on their property in order to benefit local wildlife populations.  Recently, the Forest Preserves of Cook County, in partnership with the Conservation Foundation, has developing a program where private home owners and schools can convert their yards into wildlife habitat as a means of "extending" the forest preserves into developed areas (figure 11).   Perhaps outreach efforts for stepping stones or wildlife-friendly yards could be prioritized based upon proximity to the edge of a forest preserve or to connect habitats for more mobile wildlife species such as butterflies.

On the other hands, restoring our ecosystems in an urban region doesn't necessarily have to entirely take place in delineated, set boundaries such as a forest preserve or private property.   Rather, it could be more integrated into the urban environment through environmentally-focused urban design.  For example, in city parks and pathways, even in the most densely urbanized locations, hardy native plants could take the place of traditional ornamental nursery stock, and some areas can be left naturalized to offer wildlife cover and storm-water mitigation (figure 12).  Many other metropolitan regions have conservation-minded urban planning routines in place that are officially administered, such as the many stormwater mitigation initiatives coordinated through the Prince George's County Department of the Environment near Washington, DC in Maryland. 

Figure 12:  Native landscaping and wildflower areas could be established in unlikely places, such as along the shoulder of this urban bike path in inner-city Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  

Designing and retrofitting our urban places with our natural prairie and savanna landscapes in mind  could improve the health of our local ecosystems by softening the hard edge between urban and rural, and a combined conservation, green infrastructure development, and an environmentally-centered urban design approach could bring back elements of the colorful diversity of the Chicago Region as an ecotone between the great forests of the east and the vast open prairies of the Midwest and Great Plains.