The Chicago Wilderness Consortium and Biodiversity

The Chicago Wilderness consortium is a collection of organizations working together to protect biodiversity in the Chicago region. The consortium's goals are to restore the region's natural communities to long term viability, enrich local residents' quality of life, and contribute to the preservation of global biodiversity.

The Biodiversity Recovery Plan

The consortium created the Biodiversity Recovery Plan to help guide its work toward these goals. The plan is intended to complement the other planning efforts that are steering the region toward a better and more productive future. The plan guides the consortium's work on projects in the areas of science, land management, sustainability, education and communication.

Goals

The Biodiversity Recovery Plan identifies eight primary goals:

1. Foster a sustainable relationship between society and nature in the region.
2. Enrich the quality of the lives of the region's citizens.
3. Involve the citizens, organizations, and agencies of the region in efforts to conserve biodiversity.
4. Develop citizen awareness and understanding of local biodiversity to ensure support and participation.
5. Improve the scientific basis of ecological management.
6. Protect globally and regionally important natural communities.
7. Restore natural communities to ecological health.
8. Manage natural communities to sustain native biodiversity.

Recommendations

The plan contains a number of recommended actions that would further these goals. Some of the more important recommendations are summarized below.

1. Manage more land to protect biodiversity.
2. Preserve more land with existing or potential benefits for biodiversity.
3. Protect high quality streams and lakes through watershed planning and mitigation of harmful activities to conserve aquatic biodiversity.
4. Continue and expand research and monitoring.
5. Apply public and private resources more extensively and effectively to inform the region's citizens about their natural heritage and what must be done to protect it.
6. Adopt local and regional development policies that reflect the need to restore and maintain biodiversity.

The complete Biodiversity Recovery Plan is available online as a PDF document.

For more information on what the members of the Chicago Wilderness consortium are doing to help protect biodiversity in the Chicago region, see the Chicago Wilderness Consortium section of this Web site.

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