This book will amaze readers with a dazzling portrait of local biodiversity, deepen appreciation for Indiana’s eastern hardwood forest ecosystem (among the most diverse in the nation), and inspire a desire to advocate for letting forests operate naturally. The book shines a light on the hardworking scientists devoted to understanding Indiana’s natural world and teases out their personalities and experiences working in the field. The book also documents the most “superlatives” of this extended forest inventory, or Ecoblitz, for a non-science audience, and explains why these findings matter.
The book contains 21 profiles of the Ecoblitz scientists and their findings. Profiles weave in biographical material, include direct quotes from the scientists, and sensory descriptions of each scientists’ work. The profiles utilize different formats, ranging from essays written by the researcher themselves to Q&A’s, to give the reader variety. The objective is to make the work of these dedicated scientists more accessible to readers, highlighting what it is like to be in this forest (times of day/seasons/weather conditions) doing this work.
For the last decade, IFA has 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), as well as 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. The information gained from the BCA Ecoblitz is proving invaluable to IFA’s prolonged campaign to convince the Indiana Department of Forestry to designate the Morgan-Monroe and Yellowwood SF BCA as an High Conservation Value Forest.