Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – The Capitol Rotunda was all about the wetlands when the Illinois Environmental Council put on a “Conservation Science Day.”

Victoria Wittig (pictured) of Audubon Great Lakes said most of us are disposed to have an affinity for birds and greenspace. “When you start to notice the birds around you, and they are dwindling, and you notice you don’t have a lot of greenspace, there is something deep inside that people recognize. There is something not quite right here.”

Wittig says Audubon has developed a “bird friendliness index,”

“It’s a simple measure of the number of birds, the diversity for different types of those birds, and how vulnerable, threatened, or endangered they are,” Wittig said, “and when you sum up those three values, you get what we call a bird friendliness index.”

Audubon’s web site describes the index as “a movement toward smarter, scalable biodiversity monitoring.”