IFA will hold our Annual Member Meeting on Saturday, December 7 from 12 – 6 p.m. at the Cascades Inn located at 2601 Walnut St. in Bloomington.
This meeting is open to all current IFA members (or individuals who would like to join IFA at the door) and will start with a short hike in the Sycamore Land Trust’s Beanblossom Bottoms Nature Preserve followed by overview of the last year of IFA’s work as well as the adoption of a 2025 Action Plan. We will also fill four open seats on the IFA Board of Directors. IFA’s Jeff Stant will also present his final remarks as Executive Director after eleven years in the position with the intention of introducing IFA’s new Executive Director.
A light meal and refreshments will be provided. Those coming to the hike should meet at the Cascades Inn parking lot to carpool to the Beanblossom Bottoms at 12 noon as parking will be limited at the Preserve.
As a special thank you to our members, we will be selling copies of our new book, Ecoblitz, an Indiana Forest Expedition at a member-only discount rate of $15.
This book is about a first-of-its-kind inventory of the immense diversity of life present in the deep forests of Indiana. The book chronicles the five years of field work that went into the Morgan-Monroe/Yellowwood BCA Ecoblitz by many of the most prolific experts in the biological sciences, explores what drives these experts, what their surveys produced and why they are crucial to preserving Indiana’s native hardwood forest ecosystem.
From 2014 through 2018, IFA worked with a variety of leading scientists to conduct inventories of flora and fauna in a 900 acre tract in the heart of the Morgan-Monroe and Yellowwood State Forest Back Country Area (BCA), and since then in a 700-acre tract in the Nebo Ridge area of Hoosier National Forest. More comprehensive than a weekend bioblitz, the inventories are called “ecoblitzes” by scientists because they are establishing a more complete picture over the entire growing season of the biological diversity and ecological value of these older, hardwood forests. This book chronicles the lives of the scientists who did this groundbreaking work in the BCA and are now trying to save this area as one of the largest, highest quality natural areas anywhere in Indiana.
Inventories of flora and fauna in Indiana’s forests are imperative to establish the baseline of current native biodiversity as human activity and the climate crisis ravage the state. Furthermore, these Ecoblitzes are finding life that has never been found in Indiana before. Well over 150 species of insects, spiders, fungi and lichens identified in the Morgan Monroe/Yellowwood BCA Ecoblitz had never been found before in the state and some 200 more species could not be identified by experts to the species level. The information gained from the BCA Ecoblitz is proving invaluable to IFA’s prolonged campaign to convince the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to designate the 2,700-acre Morgan-Monroe and Yellowwood SF BCA as a[n] High Conservation Value Forest.
