Biohabitats Projects, Places & People
By Amy Nelson
Places
Last month, Terry Doss and Michael Spina from our Hudson River Bioregion office helped the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and others band black skimmer (Rynchops niger) chicks on Rockaway Beach.
The species is of special concern in New York and is endangered in New Jersey. The number of colonies is dwindling. Banding the chicks helps researchers monitor the birds to better understand their movement and what may be causing their unusual mortality.
Last weekend, we were thrilled to sponsor the Spa Creek Conservancy’s Clean Water PaddleFEST. Spanning historic downtown Annapolis and its surrounding area, the Spa Creek watershed is a haven for boaters, fishermen, hikers and wildlife native to the Chesapeake Bay. Several Biohabitats staffers joined this celebration of efforts to conserve, restore, and clean up Spa Creek.
From Sept. 28-30, 1,000 change-makers from communities large and small will gather in Baltimore for Reclaiming Vacant Properties, a conference hosted by the Center for Community Progress. One of those change-makers will be Biohabitats landscape ecological planner and designer, Jennifer Dowdell.
On October 19, Biohabitats president Keith Bowers will present the University of Guelph’s annual Evidence-based Landscape Architecture Lecture.
The American Society of Landscape Architects’ Annual Meeting and Expo will be held in New Orleans October 21-24. On October 21, Biohabitats landscape ecological planner and designer, Jennifer Dowdell, will moderate a panel on Restoration and Resilience of Coastal Systems in Park Design and Planning. Panelists include Lauren Crapanzano Jumonville of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and Andrew Duggan of Studio Outside. That same day, Biohabitats president Keith Bowers will join Steven Apfelbaum of Applied Ecological Services and Chris Guillard of CMG Landscape Architecture in an open discussion on Collaborating for Ecology. On October 24, Keith will join Christina M.K. Kaunzinger of Rutgers University and Caroline Braga of Sasaki Associates on a panel to discuss Designing Campus Landscapes for Enhanced Educational Value.
Utah State University Professor Emeritus Craig Johnson is nationally known for his specialization in wildlife planning. Each year, as part of its Speakers Series, the University’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning hosts the Craig Johnson Fund for Excellence Lectures. Among the esteemed lecturers invited for the fall semester is Biohabitats president Keith Bowers, who will speak on October 28.
How do you make a school campus water independent? Find out on November 1, when senior engineer Pete Muñoz presents a training workshop at the Green California: Schools and Community Colleges Summit in Pasadena, CA.
Attendees at the District Energy & Water Academy, which is hosted by EcoDistricts, will learn how to scale energy and water solutions beyond the building. Senior Engineer Pete Muñoz is among the experts who will be in Vancouver for this event to present case studies.
Biohabitats president Keith Bowers will be a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Management and Landscape Restoration: Implications in Governance of Land Use and Urban Planning. It will be held in San José, Costa Rica November 16-20.
The Maryland Water Quality Monitoring Council works hard to strengthen communication within the state’s water monitoring and management community and to ensure the effective collection, interpretation, and dissemination of environmental data. We greatly appreciate their wok and are proud to sponsor and attend the organization’s annual gathering on December 2. If you plan to be there, stop by the Biohabitats table and say hello to Mike Thompson and Jeff Reagan.
Senior ecologists Ed Morgereth and Joe Berg will be in New Orleans Dec. 10-15 to attend the 2016 Restore America’s Estuaries Summit. The theme of this year’s gathering is “Our Coasts, Our Future, Our Choice” and Ed will present a talk on “Site-scale Coastal Resiliency Planning and Design Considerations for Climate Change Adaptation.”
People
Justin Lyon Appointed to Santa Fe Water Conservation Committee
Associate engineer, Justin Lyon, was recently appointed to the Santa Fe Water Conservation Committee. We applaud Justin’s dedication to this committee, which assists the City of Santa Fe with policy recommendations and evaluates specific programs related to water conservation.
Katelyn Milius, Water Resources Engineer & Urban Designer
“I’m a dabbler,” says Katelyn Milius, the newest member of our Great Lakes Bioregion team. She isn’t kidding. With more than six years of experience in civil engineering, she has tackled everything from modeling green infrastructure opportunities in urban regions of Ohio to supervising the construction of a micro hydropower system in the mountains of Nicaragua. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Katelyn wanted to expand her skillset by pursuing a Master’s degree in the emerging discipline of Urban Design. Now that she holds such a degree from Kent State University, she is eager to bridge the gap she so often sees between engineering and design by applying her interdisciplinary expertise and her passion for urban planning and design to projects in the Great Lakes bioregion. At Biohabitats, we love a good dabbler, and we’re thrilled to have Katelyn on our team.
Proposal Director Deborah Vere Wins Golden Acorn Award
Every quarter, one Biohabitats staff member is honored with our Golden Acorn Award. The award recognizes an employee who demonstrates through his or her actions the Biohabitats mission to “Restore the Earth and Inspire Ecological Stewardship.” The gold color symbolizes purity of purpose in protecting and defending nature, and the acorn symbolizes strength of resolve. Our most recent winner was proposal director Deborah Vere. Deb was recognized for her tireless devotion to Biohabitats’ pursuit of meaningful projects. Recipients of the Golden Acorn get to direct a monetary donation to the non-profit organization of their choice, and Deb directed hers to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness. Congratulations, Deb!
Emma Quinn, Administrative Assistant
If you’ve called the Chesapeake/Delaware Bays Bioregion office in the last month, you’ve likely spoken to Emma Quinn, our new administrative assistant. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Emma is an artist with expertise in comic book illustration and character design. With hobbies ranging from saxophone playing and t-shirt collecting to costume design and sci-fi conventions, Emma is quite a character herself. Emma’s love of biological illustration sparked an appreciation for the intersection of art and science, and the role art can play in engaging people with the natural world. But if you think she’s doodling behind the receptionist’s desk, think again. While Emma is warmly greeting and assisting our many callers and visitors, she is also deftly handling thousands of tasks to support our team. When asked what she most likes about her job, she answered, “The opportunity to assist people who are so passionate about the work they do.” Now that’s character.
We are also working on decentralized wastewater treatment/reuse systems for two Clifford Beers Housing projects in the Los Angeles area. When the developer and LOHA Architects sought a sustainable solution for managing wastewater from a new, 3-story residential building located on a former brownfield site in the City of Los Angeles, we helped them design an onsite system to collect and treat greywater from the building’s sinks, showers, and laundry facilities for reuse in irrigation and toilet flushing. The system, which will be located within the footprint of the building in the parking level, includes a self-cleaning cascade pre-filter, pump basin, textile filter, and tertiary filtration and disinfection. We’re in the final stages of design and permitting now, but it won’t be long before this system will provide a treated, pressurized source for irrigation and toilet flushing reuse in the site’s 26 residential units and ground floor retail space. We are working alongside Gonzalez Goodale Architects on another Clifford Beers development, the Holt Apartments in Pasadena, CA. A system was designed to collect greywater from this low income housing development’s communal laundry facility, treat it, and then recycle it for use in irrigating the surrounding landscape.
Georgia Tech’s Eco-commons system reflects its desire to matriculate students who, motivated by societal challenges and social needs, create solutions for both environmental and social conditions. The cornerstone of that effort is the new proposed Living Building on campus. Georgia Tech pursued an ‘ideas competition’ approach to the project and invited a crop of leading edge design teams to prepare and present concepts for the innovative campus facility. Three teams, two of which included Biohabitats, made the final selection process. Biohabitats is proud to be leading the building’s Integrated Water Strategies (IWS) for the winning team from Lord Aeck Sargant’s. Biohabitats’ approach began with understanding the regional climate context and the site’s historic and current water flows. We then estimated that the building’s demand for water was 600-1000 gallons each day, of which less than 20% was actually required for drinking water, showers, and other potable uses. With IWS strategies including rainwater harvest, and water reuse and conservation measures such as composting toilets, Biohabitats proposed to reduce the consumption for non-potable use by almost 90%.
We are also working with a group of Tech’s environmental engineering students as they explore next-generation nutrient harvesting technologies for the building as part of their senior project. Georgia Tech is interested in simplifying the path for future projects. Shortly after progress began on the Living Building, Biohabitats’ role was expanded to include a contract to identify and help solve water-related policy barriers.
“It is such a pleasure to work with a really forward-leaning client and a design team of innovators from step one in a project,” says Biohabitats team leader, Erin English. “Georgia Tech has an opportunity to help define what sustainable–and perhaps even regenerative–water and nutrient management can look like in the Southeast.”
One of the goals of the 2015 Colorado Water Plan is to develop SMPs for 80% of the state’s priority streams, and to that end, the state is offering grant funding to support SMPs. Working with the Colorado Water Trust, Biohabitats Southern Rocky Mountain Bioregion leader Claudia Browne organized a workshop to describe how to find funding and conduct an SMP, and to showcase experiences from completed planning processes. The workshop, which took place last month in Steamboat Springs, was filled to capacity. Claudia and Biohabitats ecological planner and writer, Jessica Hardesty Norris, worked with the Colorado Water Institute at Claudia’s alma mater, Colorado State University, on a special edition of their newsletter focused entirely on SMPs. She compiled articles from the workshop presenters and created a visual glossary of stream management techniques. Keep an eye out for the October edition of Colorado Water!
From Sept. 28-30, 1,000 change-makers from communities large and small will gather in Baltimore for Reclaiming Vacant Properties, a conference hosted by the Center for Community Progress. One of those change-makers will be Biohabitats landscape ecological planner and designer, Jennifer Dowdell.
On October 19, Biohabitats president Keith Bowers will present the University of Guelph’s annual Evidence-based Landscape Architecture Lecture.
The American Society of Landscape Architects’ Annual Meeting and Expo will be held in New Orleans October 21-24. On October 21, Biohabitats landscape ecological planner and designer, Jennifer Dowdell, will moderate a panel on Restoration and Resilience of Coastal Systems in Park Design and Planning. Panelists include Lauren Crapanzano Jumonville of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and Andrew Duggan of Studio Outside. That same day, Biohabitats president Keith Bowers will join Steven Apfelbaum of Applied Ecological Services and Chris Guillard of CMG Landscape Architecture in an open discussion on Collaborating for Ecology. On October 24, Keith will join Christina M.K. Kaunzinger of Rutgers University and Caroline Braga of Sasaki Associates on a panel to discuss Designing Campus Landscapes for Enhanced Educational Value.
Utah State University Professor Emeritus Craig Johnson is nationally known for his specialization in wildlife planning. Each year, as part of its Speakers Series, the University’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning hosts the Craig Johnson Fund for Excellence Lectures. Among the esteemed lecturers invited for the fall semester is Biohabitats president Keith Bowers, who will speak on October 28.
How do you make a school campus water independent? Find out on November 1, when senior engineer Pete Muñoz presents a training workshop at the Green California: Schools and Community Colleges Summit in Pasadena, CA.
Attendees at the District Energy & Water Academy, which is hosted by EcoDistricts, will learn how to scale energy and water solutions beyond the building. Senior Engineer Pete Muñoz is among the experts who will be in Vancouver for this event to present case studies.
Biohabitats president Keith Bowers will be a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Management and Landscape Restoration: Implications in Governance of Land Use and Urban Planning. It will be held in San José, Costa Rica November 16-20.
The Maryland Water Quality Monitoring Council works hard to strengthen communication within the state’s water monitoring and management community and to ensure the effective collection, interpretation, and dissemination of environmental data. We greatly appreciate their wok and are proud to sponsor and attend the organization’s annual gathering on December 2. If you plan to be there, stop by the Biohabitats table and say hello to Mike Thompson and Jeff Reagan.
Senior ecologists Ed Morgereth and Joe Berg will be in New Orleans Dec. 10-15 to attend the 2016 Restore America’s Estuaries Summit. The theme of this year’s gathering is “Our Coasts, Our Future, Our Choice” and Ed will present a talk on “Site-scale Coastal Resiliency Planning and Design Considerations for Climate Change Adaptation.”
