Sustainability at the Zoo
Geothermal Wells
The McNeil Avian Center, the Zoo's newly renovated, state-of-the-art bird exhibit is home to close to 100 spectacular birds from around the world and 50 geothermal wells buried 500 feet below the building. These wells will reduce the building's carbon footprint by 837 tons - the equivalent of taking 181 cars off the road.
The McNeil Avian Center, the Zoo's newly renovated, state-of-the-art bird exhibit scheduled to open in the spring of 2009, will be home to close to 100 spectacular birds from around the world and 52 geothermal wells buried 500 feet below the building. These wells will reduce the building's carbon footprint by 837 tons - the equivalent of taking 181 cars off the road.
What Is Geothermal Heating and Cooling?
- Utilizes the naturally stable temperature of the earth, usually around 55º F (13º C), to heat and cool.
- Depending on the climate, a heat pump can be used to either draw up or send down heat.
- For cooling, the heat pump takes the heat from the building and transfers it via the fluid into the cooler earth.
- For heating, the heat pump will draw heat from the earth and pump it up to the building.
Why Use Geothermal?
- Geothermal is efficient, environmentally-sensitive, comfortable and economical.
Worldwide Reforestation Projects
Through the process of photosynthesis, trees have the unique ability to sequester (remove) large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a permanent way. This is why developing reforestation projects locally and internationally is one of our key
Footprints initiatives. These projects are designed to offset CO
2 emissions already in the atmosphere and monitored to ensure sustainable sequestration rates, providing important habitat for wildlife as an additional benefit to reducing climate change.
Kinabatangan Forest Restoration
The Kinabatangan (Borneo) Forest Restoration project is based in the village of Sukau, where local women will be entrusted with tree replanting and care, thus also providing a financial benefit to the local village as well as to wildlife.
The project will recreate forest corridors for wildlife. Forest fragmentation in the Lower Kinabatangan River region is the major threat to the long-term survival of wildlife and proactive measures are the key to success. The area to be planted is a 2.5 acre parcel devoid of trees as a result of past human activities where natural forest restoration is hardly possible. Past logging activities have resulted in the destruction of the seed bank contained in the soil and have compacted the soil, so that natural forest regeneration will take too long to occur, if it is at all possible. In order to recreate corridors for wildlife, particularly orangutans, native, fast-growing tree species will be planted.
Greenland Woods
Greenland Woods encompasses several pockets of former scrub and grassy sites in Fairmount Park ranging in size from 0.5 to 1.5 acres. The site is within a mile or so of the Zoo, and near the Zoo’s Migrant Stopover Ecology Study bird banding project.
Planting trees in these areas will fill gaps that are currently fragmenting the habitat and will create significant plots of unbroken forest that will benefit local species such as migratory and resident birds and indigenous mammals such as raccoon, opossum, red fox, rabbit, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates such as butterflies. Current plans for Greenland Woods reforestation call for 875 trees to be planted to reforest an area of 3.5 acres.
