Winter 2004

People Who Are Taking Nature's Pulse
By Katherine Millett | Photography by Rob Warner
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Greg Spyreas: Escape to the Jungle

Greg Spyreas, professional botanist, escaped to the jungle when he was a kid. It meant leaving the Chicago apartment where he lived with his mother and three sisters, visiting an aunt and uncle near a forest preserve, and running a few blocks from their house to the imagined banks of the Nile and the wilds of the African veldt.

His favorite place was Bunker Hill Prairie, a quiet enclave on Chicago's northwest side. Today, the two-acre grassland is surrounded by a buffer zone of woods, the roar of highways, and the bass-line thumping of car radios.

Spyreas returned there last fall from his home in Champaign, while in town for a conference. Though it was curiosity that brought him back to Bunker Hill, he and colleagues on the staff of the Illinois Natural History Survey monitor several nearby sites for "CTAP," Illinois' nationally acclaimed Critical Trends Assessment Program. In fact, the agency's six-person team is currently monitoring 600 sites selected at random statewide. They split up and spend about four months driving across Illinois each year, collecting data from forests, wetlands, grasslands, and streams. They spend the rest of the year analyzing it to figure out what's growing in Illinois and how to increase diversity and balance in ecosystems.

Spyreas, now 26, has lost none of his childhood enthusiasm. As soon as he reaches the prairie, he drops to one knee by a cluster of purple buds.

"That's a fringed gentian! These are very rare, and they're probably our latest blooming prairie flower." He speaks with a tone that is authoritative but not pedantic, and he laughs softly but often. When he finds an obedient plant, he gently moves its pink, trumpet-shaped blossoms around the stem to show how obediently they stay in place. Then he spots another clump of gentian.

"Oh my God, they're all over the place. There must be some great volunteers taking care of this site." Standing to look over the scene, he surmises that buckthorn has been cleared to increase light penetration and that as many as 150 plant species are growing in the small remnant, including tussocks of prairie dropseed, numerous grasses, compass plant, and obedient plant.

Excitement aside, Spyreas values his job for the difference it makes in our knowledge about the loss and destruction of ecosystems across the state.

"I can show legislators that 25 percent of our forest vegetation is made up of invasive, very aggressive plant species," he says. "The state used to be 65 percent tallgrass prairie, and now 99.99 percent of it is gone. Tallgrass prairie is one of the world's least-preserved ecosystems. People noticed these changes before, but the evidence was anecdotal. Thanks to CTAP, we have hard data now."

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