2025 Flora, Fauna, and Fungi Surveys

The Chippewa Watershed Conservancy currently has twenty-seven nature preserves.  Every single one of those properties has a preserve management plan that is used to prioritize our goals for that property. It may come as no surprise but it’s difficult to manage nature preserves to support flora, fauna, and fungi diversity without a baseline survey of what species are present.  Unfortunately, this has long been the case for many Chippewa Watershed Conservancy properties.  Most of our preserves have never had a systematic survey of their biodiversity.  In the best case scenario, several preserves have been subject to a one day survey by one or more individuals.  In other cases, a few scattered notes have been taken of sightings encountered during annual monitoring.  In some cases, there was no record at all.  The most extensive survey that we had previously conducted was at Sylvan Solace Preserve in 2021 during which staff did a year-long survey but even that was focused solely on flowering plants.

With that deficit in mind, over the past twenty-four months, we’ve made a concerted effort to identify and catalogue as many different species as possible on CWC preserves.  This data is mostly gathered as photographs of organisms that are then entered into the website iNaturalist. We’ve also gone back through our photo archives and entered sightings that date back over the past decade or even earlier, including a selection of images captured by trail cameras. In addition to the sightings entered by CWC staff, we can also see input from other users when they share sightings from our preserves.

One advantage of using iNaturalist is that it you do not already have to be an expert at identification. The website uses artificial intelligence to offer possible species identification based on already known samples in the database.  Identifications may then be confirmed (or challenged) by other users. While many of the users are scientists, the website is also one of the largest citizen science projects in the world with nearly four million global users having made more than 280 million observations.

At our recent Fall Fundraiser, we were able to give an update on the progress of these surveys.  Several preserves were extensively surveyed in both 2024 and 2025, with multiple trips each year.  For other properties, the numbers shared represent a snapshot in time (a single trip taken on a single day) and offers a good starting point for further surveys.  Altogether, CWC staff conducted catalogue surveys on twenty of our twenty-seven preserves this year alone.  For several locations, including Stearns Preserve and McNeel Preserve, this was the first formal survey conducted of the property.  Here is a partial listing of the number of species identified to date including a comparison with a year ago:

• Sylvan Solace Preserve: 600 species (up from 490+ species in 2024)
• Hall’s Lake Natural Area: 543 species (up from 450+ species in 2024)
• Audubon Woods Preserve: 296 species (up from 280+ species in 2024)
• Bundy Hill Preserve: 299 species (up from 220+ species in 2024)
• Peterson Natural Area: 207 species (up from 140+ species in 2024)
• Quigley Creek Natural Area: 208 species (up from 110+ species in 2024)
• Hiawatha Hills Preserve: 119 species (up from 20+ species in 2024)
• Starks Preserve: 109 species (up from 80+ species in 2024)
• Szok Riverbend Preserve: 92 species (up from 50+ species in 2024)
• Stearns Preserve: 89 species (no surveys conducted prior to this year)
• Weting Preserve: 84 species (up from 40+ species in 2024)
• Neyer Preserve: 65 species (limited surveys prior to this year)
• McNeel Preserve: 52 species (no surveys conducted prior to this year)

The intent of these surveys is to help us make better informed decisions as we update our preserve management plans. The majority of these plans are more than a decade old and many have not been updated since their creation but even newer plans may be need to be updated as observations are made. Last September, the surprise discovery of a previously unknown population of the State Threatened forked aster (Eurybia furcata) at one of our Isabella County Preserves caused us to shift management priorities and update a plan that was less than three years old.  The updated management plan includes annual monitoring of the population of this special plant. For more information on our discovery of this plant visit this post from 2024.

This August, we were fortunate enough to encounter a single American bumble bee (Bombus pensylvanicus ) queen during a monitoring visit to Quigley Creek Natural Area. This was one of only nine Michigan sightings of this species listed on iNaturalist for this year and the species is listed as Endangered by the state.  This winter we will be working on an updated management plan for Quigley Creek Natural Area which, based on this discovery, will include further surveying with the specific goal of identifying other members of this species.

Even sightings of more commonplace species help us learn more about properties.  Scientists assign every species of native plant with a coefficient of conservatism (C-value) on a scale of 0-10.  Species with a high C-value (7-10) are typically only found on sites that are largely undisturbed while species with a low C-value (0-3) tolerate a much higher degree of disturbance.  The presence of a species with a low C-value does not mean that a site is degraded but the presence of a number of high C-value species is indicative of a high quality natural habitat that has seen limited disturbance.  One example of a plant with a high C-value is cucumber root (Medeola virginiana) which has a C-value of 10. We regularly find this species at Hall’s Lake Natural Area along with other conservative species, such as fringed polygala (C-value of 7) and marsh calla (C-value of 10), indicating that much of Hall’s Lake is a high quality habitat with minimal disturbance.

You can easily support our efforts by creating on iNaturalist account and sharing your own sighting as you visit our preserves on your own.  While all sightings are welcome, we especially need observations of birds, insects, and aquatic organisms.  Starting next spring, be on the lookout for several bioblitzes that we plan to host over the course of 2026.  These events will give us (CWC staff and volunteers) an opportunity to collect large numbers of observations in a single day.