Quad citizens seeking information on Rock Island’s management plans for the Milan Bottoms wetlands can hear updates at an upcoming public information meeting at Augustana College.
Recently, the Wetland Task Force and the city council sought a partnership with Augustana College’s Upper Mississippi Center to conduct community engagement surveys and data collection.
“They've already started doing some basic mapping exercises, some community engagement activities with stakeholder interviews, looking at past social media posts, doing content analysis of that,” Rock Island Planning and Zoning Manager Tanner Osing said in an interview with WVIK. “So they are already moving ahead. A three-year partnership. A lot of the analysis has yet to go on as far as ecological analysis. That's something we are really excited about.”
Dr. Michael Reisner is the director of the college’s Upper Mississippi Center for Sustainable Communities. “So right now we've got a team of about six students that have been working on both the stakeholder component and getting a start on the ecological component,” Reisner said in an interview with WVIK. “And we've got some acoustic meters and some stuff on the ground, and we've done some preliminary stuff. And then over the summer, there'll be an entire team for the Upper Mississippi Center. It'll be probably a dozen to 14 students. About six of them will be focused on the Milan Bottoms project.”
Reisner explains the acoustic meters help log the types of animals that call the wetlands home.
“[O]ur efforts to really assess the bird community diversity, the bat community diversity, once the bats come out and are active, and then to a lesser degree, some of the amphibians that are vocal,” Reisner said. “So those are what I would call passive meters that are out there 24/7, 365 days a year. And we download the audio files and then use AI technology to help identify the species, along with expert consultants helping identify some of the ones where the AI technology reaches its limits, are what it is and is not.”
He says students, with the assistance of faculty on campus and representatives from Nahant Marsh, will traverse the 550 acres to collect ecological data over three years, possibly five.
So far, the students involved in the project have spoken to 20 stakeholders, including conservation groups, landowners, citizens, and government representatives. The interviews ask respondents about the concerns they want the management plan to address, as well as what the reserve should be used for.
“There'll be a couple [of] different ways of providing feedback at this stage if people are interested in doing that,” Reisner said. “And then there is kind of a broad survey that we're looking at. And then, [in] the summer, it'll go into more specific work. We'll continue to do some interviews, and then once we have kind of a collection of interviews, we'll take a more big picture approach to kind of compiling and analyzing that information, and then probably move towards some more focus groups on specific issues that seem to be of concern of interest to a bigger group of residents or landowners.”
One resident who has been vocal about the wetlands is Kelly McKay, a retired biologist who spent decades studying bald eagles. When the city of Rock Island announced plans with developer A HANA ILLOWA LLC in 2024 to build a cannabis dispensary and filling station, he claimed the project would negatively impact night roosting bald eagles.
“We've been working nonstop on this for about two years now. Two local developers, Matt Stern and Jeff Hubanks, decided that they wanted to put a truck stop and a pot shop on a 10-acre parcel in the right corner of Milan Bottoms,” McKay said in an interview with WVIK. “The problem is that [the] site butts up immediately. Butts up adjacent to the high-use area night roost area for bald eagles. So that's primarily why I got involved, because we had done a previous study down there.”
The study McKay is referring to is a six-year, late 2000s-early 2010s study of night-roosting bald eagles conducted in coordination with the Army Corps of Engineers. Recently, the developers hired environmental consulting firm Terracon to produce an assessment of the surrounding wetlands, and the firm reported that the area is not used by bald eagles for night roosting, and that they instead night-roost farther north.
McKay takes issue with the study because the firm spent one day in the field in May, when eagles did not night-roost.
“[T]hey made the statement that not only is Milan Bottoms not a night roost, but it was abandoned two years ago. How they could possibly determine that in one day is impossible to believe,” McKay said. “There's no way they could have determined that. But because our data was, our research was dated, it was 2011. So it's [a 15-year-old data set. So we said, well, we were able to get enough funding to put together at least a much sounder project than Terracon did.”
That project spanned the months of January and February when McKay and three other community members conducted two surveys. One focused on weekly bald eagle populations from Lock and Dam 14 just north of Hampton down to Lock and Dam 16 in Muscatine.
“That's about a 38-mile stretch of the river. So we consider those the local, the quote-unquote local bald eagle wintering population,” McKay said. “So that was one aspect of it. And then the second aspect of the study was doing a weekly night roost survey, where we would monitor a three-hour period in the morning, from one hour prior to sunrise till two hours after sunrise. We would survey and record all the eagles coming out of the Milan Bottoms where they had spent the night, night roosting in there.”
McKay and the others then compared the two data sets to determine the percentage of bald eagles that were using the wetlands to conserve their energy.
“[O]ur numbers ranged anywhere from about 200 birds per night to about 450 a night that used Milan Bottoms for night roosting purposes,” McKay said. “Our weekly population surveys, what we found is that each week the Quad Cities hosted about 300 to 650 birds. So if you pair that up with 200 to 450 night roosting in Milan Bottoms, what we found is that Milan Bottoms provided critical night roosting habitat for half or more of the entire local wintering population in all but two weeks of the study.”
McKay expands that the two weeks seeing lower numbers, a third or more of the eagles, is due to the bitter temperature when eagles would utilize bluff sites that are more sheltered and protected.
“I want folks to understand, if you care about wildlife and you care about the environment, this is the most important piece of wildlife habitat left in the Quad Cities. And now it's being sacrificed. And it's not being sacrificed for something that has to go there,” McKay said.
McKay plans to fundraise to cover future surveys as development progresses, with the project projected to fully end in early 2027.
The reserve plan and the creation of the Wetland Task Force followed public outcry over announced plans to develop adjacent to the wetlands. Osing said the city never intended to develop any of the wetlands themselves. Osing notes the city hopes to finalize the designation for a Land & Water Reserve with the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission in early 2027. That means no development can take place on the 550 acres.
“So, the Land and Water Reserve, the registration is somewhat of a separate process from our partnership with Augustana College. But going through that process and talking with the folks from the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission, we started to understand that it would be really nice to have some more robust ecological data and then also some community input to inform the long-term management of this wetland area,” Osing said.
The public informational meeting, including a Q & A, will be held on Tuesday, May 5th, at Augustana College’s campus within Hanson Hall in room 234, starting at 5:30 p.m.
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