urban ecosystem news

A couple of items of interest on the urban ecology front:

• I belatedly heard a story on NPR's Great Lakes Radio Consortium this morning about mapping wilderness in Chicago. Chicago is wonderfully forward-thinking: it has a mayoral committee on nature and wildlife, and has a special zoning designation for natural areas.  Property zoned as a natural area cannot have structures or parking lots build on it.  The city has done a nice job mapping its natural ecosystems, and created one of the first regional biodiversity atlases (I was one of the authors of Michigan's first regional biodiversity atlas). More cities need to be like Chicago when it comes to paying attention to urban natural resources.

• There will be a conference entitled Evolutionary Change in Human Altered Environments at UCLA on 8 Feb to 10 Feb 2007. The description reads: "Human activities are affecting the evolutionary processes that generate and maintain biodiversity. Climate change and deforestation are facilitating the evolutionary jump of animal diseases to humans. Fish farming has resulted in the spread of poorly adaptive genes to the wild. Introductions of exotic species are impacting native species and limiting their ability to adapt. In response to this developing crisis, we are convening an international summit of evolutionary biologists, conservation practitioners, and policy makers to synthesize current knowledge and to begin to develop plans to mitigate the effects. The summit will feature talks from more than 40 top evolutionary biologists, poster presentations, and working groups. A central goal of the summit is to bring the discussion beyond academic boundaries to frame real world solutions to these problems."