Will you accept the challenge?

Teams of four teens and one adult chaperone will navigate their way through Riverside Park tackling wilderness survival challenges including: climbing, fire building, orienteering, hiking, team building, and more! Join us for the challenge on May 25th!

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Become A Sponsor!

By sponsoring a tree, you will help us transform post-industrial land into the Milwaukee Rotary Centennial Arboretum, a flourishing native ecosystem!

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Celebrate Nature in the Heart of the City

Join us for a magical summer evening filled with dinner, entertainment, and a silent auction. Proceeds will directly benefit the neighborhoods and natural environments in which we carry out our mission.

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The water's just fine at our Young Naturalists camp!

Kids in our Young Naturalists camp will investigate Milwaukee’s amazing green spaces by boat and by bike, and will have a blast stomping through the river! Register now!

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Our Mission

The Urban Ecology Center fosters ecological understanding as inspiration for change, neighborhood by neighborhood.

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Urban Ecology Center

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Impact of Urban Nature

Written by Beth Heller

Monday, April 29 2013

When we started this project we now affectionately call the Urban Ecology Center, we had a dream, a concept for implementation and a process to get us there. Our expectations for success have been significantly exceeded – never in our wildest dreams did we expect to have three vibrant environmental community centers up and running so soon from our beginnings in a trailer parked in Riverside Park. But are we really having the impacts we set out to accomplish? Are students really learning? Are our parks, that we claim are now safe, really being used? Is providing nature in the city and exposing people to it really making a difference? And how do we actually know?

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I Spy... Birds!

Written by Kara Baldwin

Friday, May 17 2013

On the first day of “I Spy…Birds!” Camp, the campers arrived excited for a fun week of camp. Some were thrilled about the prospect of spending a whole week learning about and searching for birds. Others were just excited to be at the Urban Ecology Center. And some were skeptical and needed some convincing that birds were worthy of being studied for a whole week of their summer. The skepticism was short-lived, however, as they received their binoculars and started paging through their new bird field guides (which were theirs to keep, thanks to funding from the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology and discounted binoculars through Eagle Optics.)

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Go Outside and Play: Camp

Written by Mike Larson

Wednesday, May 15 2013

When I was in college, I took a course on physical geography as part of my general education requirements. Our course textbook covered various unique and interesting natural areas in the United States ranging from the canyon lands of Utah to the limestone caves of Kentucky, and we learned about the specific geographic confluences that formed these natural wonders. One day my classmates and I were bemused to find that we were studying glacial features in the exotic locale of Southeastern Wisconsin. Having lived in the area most of my life, I never really thought of kettles, eskers, moraines, and drumlins as being anything particularly special, but apparently, these features that formed as giant sheets of ice retreated across the landscape are relatively rare in the topography of the world, and we're lucky to have them.

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Upcoming Events

Riverside Park Young Scientists Club

Water Safety Course

Email Sign-Up

Will you accept the challenge?

Become A Sponsor!

Celebrate Nature in the Heart of the City

The water's just fine at our Young Naturalists camp!

Our Mission