Field Notes - Where's Nature in the Twin Cities?

Drive the back roads just east of Highway 3 and north of Dakota County 42, where Eagan, Inver Grove Heights, and Rosemount collide, and you’ll find something special. Here, amid suburbia’s big-box retail stores and new housing clusters, stand 163 acres of hardwood forest, rolling grasslands, and glacial ponds that have escaped domestication.

According to a preliminary DNR Natural Resource Assessment, about 12 percent–or 230,000 acres–of land in the seven-county Twin Cities metro area contains natural habitat such as this, where native plants and animals still live much the way nature intended.

The assessment relied on data from several natural resources inventories to create a single computerized map of natural lands. Sharon Pfeifer, DNR project leader for the assessment, says the map gives Twin Cities residents reason to be proud, as well as concerned.

"More than 2.3 million people live in the greater Twin Cities. This map shows they have a rare opportunity to enjoy some truly wonderful natural habitats. Not many urban areas our size can say the same," Pfeifer says.

"On the other hand, the map indicates our best fish and wildlife habitats are highly fragmented, and many of them are not protected from development. The population projections I’ve seen indicate we’ll grow by another million people and half-million houses over the next 30 years. So there’s a high risk of losing many of these natural lands."

In planning for that growth, Metropolitan Council member Roger Williams says the assessment will make it easier to include natural resources conservation and wise management in land-use planning, alongside affordable housing, new roads, and commercial development.

"Knowing where areas of natural significance are allows us to grow around them," says Williams. "We hope more of those areas can be purchased and protected, but to be honest, we can’t realistically protect all of them.

"But if a natural area identified in this assessment is purchased for private development, we’ll know to work with the developer to make sure its natural integrity will be preserved. We can raise questions up front about how the developer will treat the land."

For their part, developers say they support the assessment and welcome its inclusion in regional planning.

"We only build where communities tell us we can," says Tom McElveen, public policy director for the Builders Association of the Twin Cities. "So the most important thing the Met Council can do is take these regionally significant natural areas off the table up front."

While the assessment is a good first step, more detailed land-cover mapping will be needed for land-use planning at the local level, says Pfeifer.

About 35 percent of the metro area is mapped at a level of land-cover detail that’s useful for local planning. Last year Metro DNR and a coalition of government, conservation, and builders’ organizations had hoped to begin mapping the rest of the seven-county area, but the Legislative Commission on Minnesota Resources wouldn’t pay for it.

LCMR would be the primary funding source to expedite such a massive mapping effort, Pfeifer says. As a result, it may be years before communities have the local information they need to make better land-use decisions. Meanwhile, land around the Twin Cities is being developed at a rate of 60 acres per day. And at the borders of Eagan, Inver Grove Heights, and Rosemount, an unprotected tract of forest is being considered for residential zoning.

Gustave Axelsonfree-lance writer