Oregon Wildlife Foundation
$19,502  Willamette Valley 

Portland’s Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN PDX) is a collaboration between Bird Alliance of Oregon, Oregon Wildlife Foundation, Portland State University (PSU), and Samara Group designed to collect data (images and audio) on the wildlife species sharing the urban landscape with human communities. The overarching goal of the project is to better understand the interplay between habitat connectivity, wildlife presence, and urbanization in the Portland Metropolitan region, as well as how racial inequities affect these.

The objectives of this grant scope are to continue gathering and analyzing new and existing UWIN data, create communication materials for project partners (including land managers and influential working groups) that share and summarize their local data, encourage community science volunteer efforts, and explore deeper local community engagement efforts through current and new partnerships.

Partner engagement and data collected during this project will help inform urban planning and land management decision-making, identify ways that UWIN PDX can be expanded and modified to better serve communities of color, and contribute to scientific studies across a broad region while supporting graduate/undergraduate students in these efforts. In the long-term, we aim for diverse wildlife to have more places throughout the Portland Metro region where they can thrive, and for diverse people to benefit from having more opportunities to enjoy wildlife viewing in their daily lives.

The current UWIN PDX transect is located in the Willamette Valley ecoregion and includes a portion of the Forest Park Conservation Opportunity Area. The transect spans from Hillsboro to Gresham across Portland’s center, with an extension from southwest Portland to Sherwood. Conservation Strategy Species that may benefit from work conducted as a result of the findings of this project include Western Gray Squirrel and various bat and bird species, detailed further in this application.