An oversight team was formed to guide project development.  The team consists of Sumner Matteson (WDNR’s Bureau of Endangered Resources), Steve Richter (The Nature Conservancy-Madison office), Dr. David Ewert (The Nature Conservancy-Chicago office), and Ms. Kim Grveles (WDNR’s Bureau of Endangered Resources), who has been hired to coordinate project implementation.  This team is meeting monthly.  Project progress is summarized below.

1.  A literature search on bird migration and stopover ecology issues has been conducted and a bibliography of the resulting articles has been assembled.  (Update searches will be made periodically throughout the duration of the project.)  Preliminary attribute lists have been constructed from this literature.

2.  Workshops have been held in northeast Wisconsin (Green Bay) and in southeast Wisconsin (Milwaukee).  Sites and site attributes were collected at the workshops; data from the Milwaukee workshop have been entered into a spreadsheet.  Some follow-up work is still needed for the northeast region.  Packets and site assessment forms have been mailed/given to several individuals who were not able to attend the workshops mentioned above.  These are due back by early April 2006.

Workshops have been scheduled for the Lake Superior basin on March 3, 2006 (Ashland), and for the central Lake Michigan (Oshkosh) basin on March 8, 2006.  Invitations have been sent for both workshops and preparations are close to completion.  Background materials were sent to the Lake Superior participants on February 20, 2006, along with an agenda and reminder notice. 

3.  An ArcView GIS project has been assembled with the following layers:

Topographic
IBA sites
Hydro
Electric transmission lines
Landsat                                                                     
Electric transmission substations
Managed areas (state-owned land only)                       
Power plant locations
Basin boundaries                                                         
Communication tower locations
County boundaries       
Quad boundaries

A GIS intern from UW-Madison is in the process of taking over the GIS portion of the project.  She will work out of Madison Nature Conservancy office and will be responsible for digitizing the sites and for modeling the attributes, which will be used for prioritizing sites.

4.  April 24, 2006 has been set as the date for a regional meeting between TNC’s Dave Ewert, and key people in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. 

5.  Power point slides detailing the Wisconsin project have been produced for Dave Ewert to incorporate into his talk and for general promotion of the project.

6.  Numerous individuals have committed to reviews and edits of the Phase Two conservation plan.