[Updated 2006.09.30 16:53 EDT: Added link to 360° Virtual Tour of Ellis Island.]

A rare opportunity to visit sites and buildings closed to the public the rest of the year.

openhousenewyork hosts year-round educational programs celebrating New York City’s built-environment, culminating in America’s largest architecture and design event, the Annual openhousenewyork Weekend.

As of right now, there are 27 different tours listed, plus many other activities such as lectures and so on. The complete guide will be included in today’s New York Times (City Edition only, sorry! Distant readers and out-of-town visitors should check the Web site). Here’s a couple of highlights of interest to me:

Ellis Island’s South Side, NY Harbor, Manhattan: Tour the grounds of the abandoned Ellis Island hospital where 1 million immigrants were treated between 1900-1954. Wear sturdy, closed-toed shoes. No children under age 16 will be permitted. (To see why these two conditions are important, check out Tours A-G of Jim Galvin’s 360° Virtual Tour of Ellis Island.)

Gowanus Canal Canoe Tour, Gowanus, Brooklyn: From tidal creek to urban industrial waterway, learn the history of the Gowanus Canal as you paddle a canoe along a two-mile stretch. Look out for wildlife such as blue crabs, fish and the black-crowned night heron. Tours organized by the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. Participants must sign a waiver in order to participate. (Seriously.)

Governor’s Island, NY Harbor, Manhattan: Guided tours describe the history and future of the 92-acre island’s National Historic Landmark District in the hear of New York Harbor. View military installations from the American Revolution and hear about plans for the island’s redevelopment. Organized by the Governors Island Preservaton & Education Corporation.

High Line Cell Phone Tour, Meatpacking District, Manhattan: Self-guided cell phone tour discusses various stopping points along the High Line, the disused freight rail currenlty undergoing conversion into NYC’s first elevated park. Dial the main phone number 888-7-LOOK-UP starting Saturday, Oct 7th. Each stop has it’s own three-digit extension. Organized by the Friends of the High Line.

Victorian Flatbush Walking Tour, Flatbush, Brooklyn (yep, it’s my neck of the woods!): Follow Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger through one of the largest concentrations of Victorian Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and Greek Revival homes in the US. View journalist Nellie Bly’s former home, a 1903 japanese “cottage” and many more! Organized by OHNY.

World Trade Center — The Greening of Ground Zero, Lower Manhattan: This walking tour will discuss both the scope of the World Trade Center project, Visit the recently completed 7 WTC,and learn about current work at the site, the PATH station’s sustainable features, the memorial and other WTC buildings. Organized by GreenHomeNYC.

The mission of Food For Thought, a volunteer-driven grass roots organization, is to provide nutritional support to people living with AIDS/disabling HIV disease. They supply groceries to over 300 men, women and children each month.

Several years ago, my job at that time was ending, and I was uncertain if I would continue in the same career. I considered going back to school and getting a degree in horticultural therapy. The gardens of Food for Thought sound like the vision I had of what could be accomplished. It brings together non-profit organizing, community involvement and relevance, and deeply and personally meaningful volunteer opportunities. Gardening provides the means to accomplish all of these, and thus becomes an end in itself.

Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times article published yesterday which brought this to my attention:

Founded in 1999 to provide produce for people living with AIDS, the garden is part of what may well be the country’s hippest food bank, a place where the Alice Waters grow-your-own organic food ethic supplants gloomy institutional staples like American cheese and day-old bread.
…
The garden, run by Food for Thought, a nonprofit organization, is overseen by horticulturalists from the nearby Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, and many of its volunteers are H.I.V. patients who benefit from it. It brims with green beans and scallions but also obscure varieties of amaranth, an ancient Andean grain with flowing Rapunzel-like purple stalks. The fresh produce harvested by the volunteers is the food bank’s mainstay, though it also dispenses other groceries as well as vitamins.

The bank reflects not only Sonoma County’s obsession with food and wine but also its lesser-known side: long a weekend and vacation destination for gays from San Francisco, about 70 miles south, the area along the Russian River absorbed a heavy exodus from the city in the 1980’s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
…
The food bank, which has an exuberant bower of pink Mme. Alfred Carrière roses at the entrance, serves as horticultural therapy for the volunteers, who prune, snip and add wiggly red worms to vegetable compost. It is also part of a broader move to bring organic food and a bit of the wild into places where it has been lacking, among them schools and prisons.

– New York Times, September 26, 2006, A Rare Kind of Food Bank, and Just Maybe the Hippest, Flourishes

Links:

• Occidental Arts & Ecology Center
• Calabash Art Fest

Contact information for Food for Thought:

Email: Stewart Scofield, FFTVolunteer@aol.com

Food For Thought
6550 Railroad Avenue
P.O. Box 1608
Forestville, CA 95436
707.887.1647
foodfairy@aol.com

To find out, visit the Plants in Motion web site:

Although our lives depend on plants for virtually everything that keeps us alive (oxygen, food, fibers, lumber, fuel, etc), their lives remain a secret to most of us. The reason is simple – plants live on a different time-scale from ours. Although not usually obvious in the relatively hyperactive activities of humans, plants are in constant motion as they develop, search for light and nutrients, avoid predators, exploit neighbors, and reproduce.

Time-lapse photography allows us to easily see the movements of plants and clearly demonstrates that plants are living organisms capable of some extraordinary things. … The movies on this site show a variety of plants living out their dynamic lives. While we especially hope this site provides material that may captivate the interest of budding plant biologists, even the seasoned plant biologists will find interesting material.

Not to mention jaded old gardeners!

Viewing the movies requires QuickTime.

Thanks to Seed Magazine‘s Daily ZeitGeist for bringing this to my attention.

National Public Lands Day is the nation’s largest hands-on volunteer effort to improve and enhance the public lands American’s enjoy. In 2005, nearly 90,000 volunteers built trails and bridges, planted trees and plants, and removed trash and invasive plants. Join us Saturday, September 30, 2006 for the 13th annual National Public Lands Day and help us care for our land. We invite everybody from federal land management agencies to state parks and playgrounds in local neighborhoods to participate.

Check their Get Involved page to learn more. Activities in your area may be coordinated by a local organization. For example, in New York City the activities are being coordinated by Partnership for Parks, a joint program of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and the private, non-profit CityParks Foundation.

Thanks to RESTORE, the weekly email newsletter of the Society for Ecological Restoration International (SER), for bringing this to my attention.

Links:

• National Public Lands Day: Get Involved
• Society for Ecological Restoration International (SER)
• NYC:
  • Partnership for Parks
  • Parks & Recreation
  • CityParks

I’ve recently discovered this new blog, just launched in August of this year. The author, Garfman, explains his/her inspiration in the inaugural blog entry:

Take a good look at the WWF website, (World Wildlife Fund, not the other one) and what do you see? The giant panda, of course. Tigers. Gorillas. Cetaceans. The token reptile, a sea turtle. Generally cute and/or fuzzy, or, failing that, sleek and “handsome”. Notice a pattern?
…
Pulling up the Ohio Endangered Wildlife List, I discovered that among the listings was a species of midge. A midge! You know, the relatively inconspicuous insects that go largely unnoticed by anyone except entomologists–unless you’re swatting at a cloud of them. If that wasn’t enough, they were joined by endangered lampreys, beetles, clams, and some of the aforementioned snakes. Well, that settled it. These were as imperiled, and at least as important as the black bear, whose stories have peppered state news. Where were the American burying beetle news features? The “Save the Wartyback Mussel” t-shirts? The Ohio lamprey plush toys?

Garfman intends to publish one species profile a week. So far, we’ve seen:

• Thamnophis radix radix, the eastern plains garter snake.
• Neoceratodus forsteri, Queensland (or Australian) lungfish
• Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, eastern hellbender
• Sphenodon punctatus, tuatara
• Lepidurus packardi, vernal pool tadpole shrimp
• Cyclura lewisi, Grand Cayman blue iguana

Now, I happen to be quite fond of the squamates, but I recognize that others are not, so there’s a need to highlight their perils and needs for protection and conservation. The Indiana Bat is another species on the Ohio list which is largely misunderstood, if not outright feared, and therefore deserving of special attention.

I think Garfman can go “uglier.” Hagfish is about as gross as you can get, but they’re not on the Ohio list. Lampreys are a close second, and they’re on the list.

What would be your top choice for an endangered “ugly” species?

Links:

• Endangered Ugly Things
• Ohio Endangered Wildlife List
• Thanks to Matt’s Pooflingers for bringing this to my attention.

The experimental area, showing the five cleared patches, with two connected by a corridor.
Credit: North Carolina State University

Corridors are a technique intended to allow species to travel between otherwise isolated habitats. A research study, recently published in Science magazine, examined the question of whether or not corridors actually encourage dispersion of species and, if so, the extent of that effect. The abstract describes it this way:

Habitat fragmentation is one of the largest threats to biodiversity. Landscape corridors, which are hypothesized to reduce the negative consequences of fragmentation, have become common features of ecological management plans worldwide. Despite their popularity, there is little evidence documenting the effectiveness of corridors in preserving biodiversity at large scales. Using a large-scale replicated experiment, we showed that habitat patches connected by corridors retain more native plant species than do isolated patches, that this difference increases over time, and that corridors do not promote invasion by exotic species. Our results support the use of corridors in biodiversity conservation.

The study has been widely covered in the press. More information about the methodology and outcomes of the study is available from these reports:

To perform the research, the scientists collaborated with the U.S. Forest Service at the Savannah River Site National Environmental Research Park, a federally protected area on the South Carolina-Georgia border. Most of the Savannah River Site is covered with pine plantations. The U.S. Forest Service created eight identical sites, each with five openings, or patches, by clearing the pine forest. A central patch was connected to one other patch by a 150-meter-long, 25-meter-wide corridor, while three other patches were isolated from the central patch – and each other – by the surrounding forest. The patches are home to many species of plants and animals that prefer open habitats, many [of] which are native to the historical longleaf pine savannas of this region.

You can see these patches in the photo above. The dumbel-shaped opening at the top center of the photograph is the two corridor-connected patches. Over the several years of the study, the number of species in the patches joined by the corridor was greater than in the disconnected patches:

The researchers surveyed all plant species inside connected and unconnected patches from 2000 to 2005; nearly 300 species of plants were found. When the study began, there was no difference in the number of species between connected and unconnected patches, the scientists say. After five years, however, patches with a corridor retained high numbers of species, while those without a corridor lost species.

Corridors provided the largest benefit to native species while having no effect on the number of invasive plant species. Invasive species seem to already be everywhere, not needing corridors for their spread, or remain where they originated, [lead author, Ellen] Damschen says. These results indicate that using corridors in conservation should provide benefits to native species that outweigh the risk of furthering the spread of exotic species.

I see two problems with generalizing the favorable results from this study. First, the study looked at clearings in forests. As the press release notes, the species are those which prefer open regions. These are more likely to be “opportunistic” species adapted to colonizing disturbed areas such as those arising from fires. I would expect such species to “travel” well, since they must locate these open areas before they regain significant woody plant cover.

The second problem I see with generalizing these results is that it’s looking at the wrong kind of corridor. The single greatest threat to biodiversity is habitat loss arising from human activities, such as development, logging, mining, farming, and so on. These activities create the inverse relationship: “patches” of forest or other undisturbed habitat separated, divided, and chopped up by human activities, ie: clearings. The corridors we need, and which ecologists and others strive to implement and preserve, connect forests and other habitats separated by clearings, not clearings separated by forest.

Links:

• NCSU: In Large-Scale Study, NC State Scientists Show Landscape Corridors Promote Plant Diversity By Preventing Species Loss
• Science Daily: Landscape Corridors Promote Plant Diversity By Preventing Species Loss
• PhysOrg: Wildlife Corridors Benefit Plant Biodiversity, Native Plants
• Science Magazine: Corridors Increase Plant Species Richness at Large Scales (abstract only; full text requires subscription)
• New York Times: Research Shows That Plants Like a Path to Biodiversity (abstract only; full text requires free online registration)

Silvercup Studios is most famously home to Tony Soprano; since last July the former bakery, located next to the Queensboro Bridge, also became the site of New York’s largest green roof. In 2002 landscape architect Diana Balmori conducted a study of the city’s rooftops to identify the best area where green-roof construction could have an impact not just on an individual building but an entire neighborhood. The study revealed that Long Island City would be the most promising neighborhood for clustering these environmentally friendly roofs, which help clean the air, reduce storm-water runoff, lower energy consumption, and ultimately reduce the heat caused by urban congestion.

There is enough suitable flat roof space in Long Island City to cover more than 26 million square feet with green-roof technology—or 667 acres, nearly the size of Central Park. Known as pancake roofs, the countless flat-topped warehouses were mostly built before 1955, when structures were generally overengineered; therefore they can withstand rooftop vegetation without additional support.
…
The green-roof system on Silvercup is a modular one built by GreenTech, a company based in Roswell, Georgia, which donated a third of the modules for the project. Unlike plantings directly on the roof—a more common type of green-roof system—the interlocking modules can be moved and replaced (see “Green How-To” on page 100). Covering 35,000 square feet required 1,500 modules filled with a lightweight soil and then planted with 20 different varieties of sedum. Sedum is heat and drought resistant because it retains a high percentage of water in its shallow root system. Therefore it absorbs and holds more rainwater, reducing storm-water runoff and minimizing landscaping maintenance. Irrigation is needed to get the plants established, but they eventually become self-sustaining.
– View From the Bridge, Lisa Chamberlain, Metropolis Magazine