TFN serves as Team Leaders for the City of Toronto’s Community Stewardship Program (CSP) site at Cottonwood Flats, helping to protect & restore habitat there by planting trees, casting seeds, pulling invasives, picking up litter and more!
All Torontonians are welcome to volunteer with the CSP and come lend TFN a hand at Cottonwood Flats. For more information and/or to volunteer, simply email volunteering@torontofieldnaturalists.org.
Our stewardship efforts benefit from data collected by TFN’s long-standing (and ongoing!) Cottonwood Flats Monitoring Project (CFMP). CFMP data informs our CSP stewardship activities and the interventions of our CSP stewards are monitored & documented long-term by CFMP. This robust circle of citizen science and practical stewardship has limitless potential benefits, not only to nature, but to deepening our understanding of the impacts of stewardship strategies and techniques in an urban environment.
Years of data collected by CFMP clearly shows that without the intervention of stewards, the Flats would no doubt become a extension of the kind of urban wilds typical of the lower Don. But the transformation of the Flats from post-industrial snow-dump to renaturalized area more than a decade ago was inspired by a desire to see it thrive as something different: a small spot of meadowland and wetland, vital habitats too scarce in Toronto. Volunteers, just like you, are key to the long-term health of this area and the remarkable biodiversity it sustains.
Please reach out to us at volunteering@torontofieldnaturalists.org if you’d like to get your hands dirty helping nature with us!
