We work in partnership with you to protect and cultivate urban nature and urban nature sites. We promote balanced urban planning that incorporates data from our urban nature surveys, to ensure that city planners take local nature into account. To date, around 50 towns and local councils have conducted urban nature surveys, and data from some of these have been incorporated into municipal master plans and schemes.
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This year, for the first time, we conducted urban nature surveys in Arab communities in Judea and Samaria. Some municipalities--including in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Kfar Saba--have compiled urban nature municipal policy documents. In 2019, the Jerusalem Municipality approved a master plan—the first of its kind in Israel—for creating urban nature sites in the city.
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This year, we celebrated a decade of urban nature surveys, and are delighted to see that they are gaining momentum across Israel. There is a growing group of officials in national and local government offices who are now involved in work around urban nature, and we are working with these partners to compile a national urban nature database and employ urban ecologists.
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This year, we also marked the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Nili and David Jerusalem Bird Observatory—Israel’s very first urban nature site. Located in the National Quarter (Kiryat HaLe’om) in Jerusalem, the Observatory has welcomed a great many visitors since it first opened its doors a quarter of a century ago.
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Whenever we talk about urban nature, we often hear skeptical responses from people who question whether there really is any nature--animals, plants, birds—in our cities. However, nature lovers who live in Israel’s cities are well aware of the richness of urban nature, and this is why we are doing everything we can to ensure that all Israel’s urban residents can get to know the amazing wildlife on their doorsteps.
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Unveiling the Results of Our Many Urban Nature Surveys, From the North to the South​
This year, we held a series of public events to unveil the results of our urban nature surveys. Organized in partnership with local authorities, these events aimed to show the public the exciting wealth of nature that exists right in the heart of Israel’s towns and cities, and to emphasize the importance of protecting it. We also held a series of meetings for local authority employees in several major cities, including in Jerusalem, Netanya, Herzliya, and Kfar Saba, to help them learn more about urban nature.
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Monitoring and Protecting Urban Nature—Together with You
In recent years, we have provided online urban nature reporting forms and asked the public to join our civilian science initiatives, including via our smartphone app. Citizen Science is a partnership between ordinary citizens and scientists.
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At SPNI, we consider ourselves a bridge between the public and scientists on issues concerning nature conservation, biodiversity, and open spaces. We encourage Israel’s nature lovers to get involved in citizen science—by reporting injured animals, helping to promote wildlife crossings, monitoring butterflies, counting birds to enable us to track population changes, reporting on bird sightings, and mapping conservation-sensitive areas.
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Many of our monitoring activities occur in urban areas. We conduct extensive civilian science monitoring work in six major cities--Haifa, Hadera, Tel Aviv, Modiin, Jerusalem, and Beersheba. Through these activities, which are organized through our urban communities, we come into contact with a large number of Israeli nature lovers who are deeply committed to protecting the environment. We run training courses for groups of activists involved in vital monitoring work, who have a deep knowledge of the urban nature on their doorsteps. The data these activists collect help us work in a more focused way to protect urban nature.
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Together with the Israel Lepidopterists’ Society, which runs the Israel Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, we have set up groups of activists in Hadera and Modiin to monitor butterflies. After undergoing training, volunteers from these groups go out each week to monitor butterflies along a set route. The data they collect provide scientists with a continuously updated picture of local butterfly populations.
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In Haifa, there is a great deal of interest in understanding more about the salamanders living in the city’s wadis. To help us improve our understanding of the salamander population, we created and launched a salamander reporting form. A group of nature enthusiasts has teamed up with SPNI’s Haifa community and the HaLev HaYarok environmental organization to carry out surveys of the salamanders in the wadis on rainy evenings. The volunteers have recorded tens of salamanders—a far larger population than we thought—living in the wadis. SPNI’s Haifa community has also launched a new project to monitor the city’s wild boar population.
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Following Up Urban Nature Surveys
Public interest in urban nature is on the rise, and we are also delighted to see that local municipalities are incorporating the data accumulated in our urban nature surveys into planning. A wonderful example of this is the process that is taking place in Pardes Hanna-Karkur, which is a great model for how data collected through our urban nature surveys can be utilized by the public in various ways. Here, our Hof HaCarmel Field School and the Local Council of Pardes Hanna-Karkur are driving a process to incorporate urban nature survey data into the integration, conservation, and management of natural infrastructure in the urban environment. By combining our efforts in this way, we all reap the benefits. We believe that the best way to conserve the environment for the benefit of all is for local communities to work together to protect local nature.
Urban Nature Week
In March 2019, at the height of Israel’s flower and rainy seasons, we joined 20,000 Israelis to celebrate Urban Nature Week—something that has already become an annual tradition. Over the course of the week, thousands of people took part in over 50 events at urban and nature sites across Israel. There was something for everyone: small group tours for families, young people, nocturnal wildlife enthusiasts, bird and butterfly enthusiasts, tree lovers, and anyone who wanted learn about the colorful sea of flowers blooming all around them; lectures, photography exhibitions, and discussions; a documentary film about nature and the city; and held activities to explore the rich wildlife in our public gardens. Together with you, the Israeli public, we celebrated the nature that is thriving in our towns and cities, and learned how to protect this amazing natural world right outside our homes.
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Gazelle Valley Park Wins Inaugural Nechama Rivlin Prize for Sustainability
As part of the 4th Israeli Climate Conference, President Reuven Rivlin awarded the first Nechama Rivlin Prize for Sustainability to four remarkable projects and campaigns, among them SPNI’s Gazelle Valley Park (Emek Hazvaim), the largest urban nature park in Israel and home to around 50 gazelles, which we manage on behalf of the Jerusalem Municipality.
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Gazelle Valley Park is a spectacular area of nature at the very heart of the city. Today, it is very difficult to imagine Jerusalem without Gazelle Valley Park, but until very recently, this was really the case. The area has been under threat from developers on several occasions. The Gazelle Valley Action Committee, which SPNI founded alongside local activists and other environmental organizations, firmly opposed the destruction of this important area of nature, and in 2015, the Park--a unique, new model for managing a natural ecosystem within a city—was opened to the public. We are delighted at this success, and we would like to thank the Rivlin Family for choosing us, as well as our wonderful colleagues who work tirelessly every day to maintain this magical urban nature park.
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Currently, we are planning to open another urban nature park in Jerusalem—the Nahal Zimri Park—where we will put into practice the important principles that already underpin our management of Deer Valley Park.
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We will continue to conduct urban nature surveys and to push for their data to be incorporated into city planning. We will also continue to promote the physical and statutory protection of urban nature sites, and the establishment of communal urban nature parks, their professional management, and their upkeep by strong, active communities.