Alumni
Profiles of Success
Timothy Vargo
Research Coordinator
Urban Ecology Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
M.S. 2001
Tim Vargo’s position at the Urban Ecology Center, a not-for-profit community nature center in the heart of downtown Milwaukee, has been an exciting way for him to combine his love for teaching with his interest in ecology and environmentalism. He started at the Center in 2002 as an environmental educator and was promoted to Research Coordinator in 2004. “I am now able to combine my research experience with my desire to work with the public through outreach,” he said.
As Research Coordinator, said Vargo, “I connect researchers with local volunteers who act as research assistants throughout the projects. We are using citizen-based monitoring in all of our projects, connecting publishable research projects with the community.” The concept is called Citizen Science. “Volunteers provide researchers with much-needed labor, and researchers provide volunteers with experience doing field research,” he explained. “Some of the best research volunteers have a biology background but went into a field like accounting or banking or something where there’s more money. Or retired teachers or professors also make great volunteers.”
The research projects at the Center are quite varied. They include studying the population dynamics of a threatened species of snake that is only found in the Greater Milwaukee Area and is abundant in Milwaukee’s urban park. Another is studying bio-remediation techniques to remove the pollutants along the river and railroad. A third involves looking at how birds utilize county parks during migration. “We look for relationships between the state of the birds in the park,” said Vargo, “with factors such as vegetation (are birds getting the nutrients they need from parks dominated by exotic vegetation), location (riparian, coast, upland, etc.) and patch size (is there a minimum size that a forest patch has to be for birds to successfully use it). We band our birds as part of an international database, so if our bird is caught again in Cuba, that helps us determine migration routes.”
Vargo became interested in this type of work while at Purdue. “As a graduate student, I participated in an outreach program, ‘lunch with a scientist,’ going to a local grade school in Lafayette to teach about tropical ecology,” he said. After graduating from Purdue, he worked in Costa Rica and volunteered at the Tirimbina Rainforest Center. “They have a similar mission to the Urban Ecology Center, using funds from Ecotourism to support local environmental education to the very poor communities around the Center,” Vargo explained. “In my field work in Costa Rica, I became aware of issues in local communities that need to be addressed by researchers and the need to involve the local communities in research. If all of the tropical ecology is done by North Americans and then all the work is published in English Journals not available to local students, we are doing a disservice to these communities.”
At the Urban Ecology Center, Vargo said, “We focus on neighborhood schools that are typically underserved by environmental education and focus on giving children repeated access to local green spaces with a mentor.” He coordinates the High-school Outdoor Leadership Program, which, he said, “teaches local high-school students to become mentors to neighborhood youth while learning ecological concepts both in Milwaukee and the Teton Science School in Wyoming.”
“One of the reasons I love my job is that there is no typical day,” said Vargo. “A day could be working in the field on one of the research projects; it could be organizing workshops/lectures; it could be out in Wyoming or in Costa Rica with high-school kids; it could be canoeing down the Milwaukee River; or it could be sitting behind a computer screen.”
To current students, Vargo advises, “I strongly encourage students to get involved with the community in which they are doing research. Outreach programs with local schools are important in encouraging future generations to get involved with the sciences. It also adds another applied dimension to your work and adds a support network for your research.” He continued, “Consider the big picture, both ecologically and socially. Involve the community in your work, and the rewards will come in many ways.”