Urban Ecology Center

1. Urban Ecology Center By: Casie Dana & Carly Spotts

2. About Urban Ecology Center • The Urban Ecology Center is a non profit environmental community center. • They won National awards for their use of recyclable and renewable materials. • The Urban Ecology Center is located in one of the most diverse and populated parts of Milwaukee. It is located by the Riverside park and consists of 12 acres of land.

3. The Urban Ecology Building • The urban ecology building is 20,000 sq ft. It cost 3,700,000 dollars to build. • The building has: • A 40 ft climbing wall • A Native Wisconsin Animal Room that is home to turtles, fish, frogs, and snakes. All these animals are animals native to Wisconsin they are all on display for visitors to look at. • A pond outside in front of the building. The pond has a people-powered fountain is home to many different bugs, leaches, and is often visited by ducks. • They have a green roof garden that holds the Tipi in the winter which they hold fires in from time to time. • Rain water flushed toilets where you can choose if you want to have a half tank or full tank flush. • Reused hard maple wood floors that were over 100 years old to build the building. • The solar electric panels that cover the roof have 44.4 kilowatts and are the largest solar installation in Wisconsin.

4. The Building This is the 40 foot climbing wall that they use on special events that they host. This picture was taken on the day of the Earth Day Festival. It is attached to the look out tower on the side of the building.

5. The Pond This is the pond that I located in the front of the Urban Ecology Center. They find many different kinds of bugs and other water creatures in the pond that they fish and identify.

6. The Building This is the front of the building that has a wrap around porch made from wood scraps from the construction of the Atlantic City Boardwalk. You can see the overhang in the front and to the left on the roof is where the solar panels are.

7. Garden Truck This is the garage where they keep the trucks like the one in the picture. They self garden supplies and plants off these trucks at festivals like Earth Day. This is also the Tipi you see where they sometimes sit and have fires under the Tipi in the winter time.

8. Compost These are some of the compost bins that they use to make fertilizer.

9. Our experience at the Urban Ecology Center. • The Burdock Brigade: The fist day we went down to the trails of riverside park and covered the muddy paths with woodchips so people could walk on the path without getting muddy. This was also so when people did walk down the trails it would be easy for them to see where the trails were so they didn’t venture off them and possibly kill or hurt the plants growing around it.

10. Riverside Park ~This is one of the trails we covered with woodchips. ~Riverside park is right next to the urban ecology center and this is the park we laid woodchips at. ~We also put down broken off branches so people know where the paths are.

11. Pulling Garlic Mustard • The Urban Ecology Center has people pulling garlic mustard on a regular basis. The reason for this is that the garlic mustard plant is native to Europe and though there are many animals that may eat it there, there are no animals that eat the plant here in the United states. There for if the plant is not pulled on a regular basis it will continue to grow and take over the woods

12. Garlic Mustard This is a picture we found from Google images of a forest where Garlic mustard has not been picked This is a picture of what Garlic mustard looks like up close. Garlic mustard grows from 30-100 cm tall. The leaves are stalked triangular to heart shaped, with a coarsely toothed margin. (info from Wikipedia) This is what the Riverside Park would probably look like if the Urban Ecology Center didn’t pick Garlic Mustard.

14. The Earth Day Festival is a festival the Urban Ecology Center holds every year. • They have many different activities for kids and families to do together such as, rock climbing, food, music, arts and crafts, face painting, Animal Olympics, carriage rides, ect.

15. Activities on Earth Day They provided food like brats, hot dogs, chips, soda, water, ect. They had a room for arts and crafts. They had face painting. A Korean Traditional drum group come play.

16. Animal Olympics • The Animal Olympics was the main activity we helped out with for Earth Day. • It was a set up of 5 stations for the kids to go to and after they did the activity at the station they would write down their information on the half sheet of paper they were given. The activities were: • How fast can you flap your wings in 1 minute • How fast can you run 75 feet. • How far can you leap • How high can you jump • How big is your wingspan. ~If the kids did every station and fill out their sheet of paper they could put their name in for a prize.

17. Animal Olympics • For half of our service learning hours we volunteered to make the posters for the Animal Olympics. • This included decorating the posters, doing research on different animals, getting a list of material, ect. • Then on earth day we were there to assist the kids at each station, and help them fill out their information.

18. The work of the Urban Ecology Center is connected with other places and at a neighborhood scale by cleaning up local parks so people are able to use them without there being trash laying around, or weeds overgrowing onto the trails. They are also maintaining the park so that the animals are not harmed by eating the trash or so nothing is damaging their environment.

19. Our Conclusion • Our experience at the Urban Ecology Center was a very positive one. We learned a lot about what they do to help the environment and the different ways we can help out the environment on our own. The group leaders that we met for service learning were very helpful and knowledgeable about the different types of plants in the park and what we need to do to take care of them, and how to remove them if need be.