Can you guys hear me? Okay. Great. So what are natural areas, you know, our parks, our green spaces, but there's also a lot of natural areas in our parks, the forests, the prairies, the wetlands, the waterways. Those are really critical parts of our parks. But just stepping back for a minute, we here are sitting on borrowed land from the indigenous people from the Anishinabe nation, the three tribes and parks offer us the opportunity to help to deal with the relationship and and all the baggage that goes on with them. And they give us an opportunity to develop those relationships heal those relationships. So parks are great spaces to protect our history, our land, or water or soil, that our hearts also are really important for keeping us healthy in terms of mitigating climate change. You know, think about it, it's a it's a 90 degree, August day and you walk around in the city and walk into the forest, immediate drop in temperature as well as natural areas because of those trees. Parks are natural areas to help to absorb stormwater to help protect from flooding, they play all of these roles. And then secondly, we talked a bit about mental health earlier today. They are really important spaces for our mental health. In Japan by practicing all forest bathing, whilst on a couple of hours and just open your mind to the natural world because our minds are so close to the natural world these days, the average American spends 93% of their time indoors, we need these parks for our own sanity. during COVID. I don't know your park, but people were all over our nature trails in which we really need our products. And then lastly, it's our youth who are going to keep this whole thing going. And our parks offer accessible opportunities for youth to immerse themselves in nature. So natural resource management is, you know, just referring to how we monitor and take care of our parks. Now, you may have a lot of beautiful natural areas and your parks, but they have all been altered. They've been farmed, drain filled, trash dumped there. And now we have this huge problem with invasive species. So they need a lot of care in Rouge Parks case, you know, it was it was purchased from 25 Farms. So we have that whole legacy. So we need we have a lot more to do to take care of these natural areas. Most of our cities actually don't really know how to take care of natural areas, but they're getting better. And the good news is that the city of Detroit has made a commitment to taking care of natural areas. Now that was nice timing. But Jeff Klein just walked back out in from the city. And he and Kate who's Kate there in the back both work for the City to develop natural areas management plans for our cities. I mean for I'm sorry for Detroit parks. So how many of you are involved in managing natural areas in your park? Wow, okay, well, I'm hoping that by the time you leave, we converted all. So what can you do? I mean, the very first thing is just go out to your park and observe and see what's out there take inventories. If you don't know what you're looking at. There are a lot of locals that will come and do a tree walk for you or the Michigan butterfly association will come out and identify your butterflies. There's a lot of resources out there. So get to know your park, monitor your park. Once you start doing that, you're going to notice that you've got some weird plants out there that maybe shouldn't be there. And the classic one is garlic mustard. It's a plant that carpets, the forest floor in the springtime and crowd zone was Trilliums and those, native flowers. And it's a really easy thing to do to just have volunteers go out and spread and pull. It doesn't take any equipment just about to put them in. You can build nature trails, you can plant trees. One of the really surprising things for us is that we got some funding to improve the trail. It was a social trail, and I was going there, but we laid it out. We put interpretive signage, and then we put a bench and a kiosk. And I don't know what happened. Every time I go by, there's somebody parked there hiking the trail. It wasn't that the trail wasn't there. It just was people didn't know about it. And by doing those things to invite people into nature, it goes a long way towards towards improving things. We the day that we did the trail opening, we invited the school in the park, every single class from that school came out and did a scavenger hunt on the trail. other things you can do, you know, install rain garden, restore habitat, and you can go to the next slide. So just a little bit about my own experience in Rouge Park and some lessons learned with us managing natural areas. In 1999, there was a forester in Rouge Park and he got really tired of mowing so much of the park. Now it's great to mow the recreational areas, but these were just fast areas nobody was using for sports or anything, and he also saw that that would be a great opportunity to create more wildlife habitat. He also was working with some UofM botanist who were finding some rare plants out there. So a few years later, the city got a grant actually from the Rouge project to improve water quality by planting a tall grass prairie. This is a type of habitat we used to have all over Southeast Michigan, of course it all have mowed down because it's great agricultural habitat. But it's something that's that we're in need of more restoration of so they got a grant from the EPA to restore 17 acres in Rouge Park and then our sister park Eliza Howell Park. it was a city initiative and neighbor people live along the park and almost neighbors were very supportive of this project. So establishing a priority is not as easy as you might think. We hired the Esther Burwell from the Michigan wild flower farm. She's up in a picture there standing there about two years down the line. She treated all the grass with round up. And then we planted, she seeded it. And as she had a contract over the years, to mow it, because it will turn to woody and turn to forest if it wasn't maintained with fire and people got really interested in the project and National Wildlife Federation came out, friends of the rouge, lots of people got really interested. The picture in the lower part is five years down the line, it took five years to establish a really good looking prairie. That was a great story. And then a few years down the line, the city administration changed. And the director of parks didn't like the look of the prairie and decided to mow the whole thing down. So we were suddenly laying down in front of lawn mowers. we decided to do some things to make it look better because one of the problems is that it looked messy. We have this long history of not knowing our vacant lots people thought it was messy. So we got the city to mow the edges to make it look very clean. And then we work with a local school to design some signs that may look intentional. So these are just kind of temporary signs, you know, as brownies come out and clean up and install those signs. Now people knew this is an area that's supposed to be a little bit messy, it's habitat. And it also guided the mower so that they knew where to mow. Eventually we improved those signs. And then the second thing is you want to make it look intentional. But a tall grass prairie is a fantastic thing. These some of these tall grasses, grasses will grow six feet tall. And to keep out there walking in them is just incredible experience. And so we needed to mow a trail, of course the city didn't want to do it. So we're gonna have a lot more for the Buffalo Soldiers in the park. And there's my husband, he's here today, on the mower, we motor out there trails and now since then the city has been maintaining the trail, they just didn't really know where to put it. And then we also got the local Southeast Michigan butterfly association to do butterfly walks for us. And I'm doing that every year we'll have 60 people come out and see all butterflies in the trails.