#8 of 2024: 10 years with IDNR and the Living With Wildlife team

Having just returned from inspiring meetings with our team in Springfield, IL, this seems like a great time for this post.?

In 2014 we began work on a series of wildlife related websites and services for citizens of Illinois, thanks to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife, the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center, and a fantastic team of domain experts, writers, editors, designers, and artists that we collectively call the Living With Wildlife team. Ten years and going strong, this is some of 2wav's most gratifying, enduring, and impactful work.?

The IDNR Wildlife Division staff are remarkable, dedicated, professionals, wonderful customers, and more like partners at this point. The Living With Wildlife team members are every one exceptional, and after all these years. dear friends.?

All our gratitude to everyone involved.?

Here are a few of our accomplishments:

Wildlife Illinois

A site to identify & learn about Illinois wildlife, and provide resources to help with all manner of issues living with wildlife: avoiding problems, dealing with nuisance animals, rehabilitating injured animals, and to report sightings of special interest species. Beginning 17 years ago as an Illinois Extension project, this site moved to our team in 2015, and underwent a major redesign in 2024 (https://outdoor.wildlifeillinois.org/articles/wildlife-illinois-redesigned/). This site sees over 40 thousand unique visitors per month in peak season.

Outdoor Illinois Journal

OutdoorIllinois Journal carries on the tradition of the venerated Outdoor Illinois print magazine. Launched in 2015, this online journal has almost 900 articles about Illinois fish & wildlife, education, hunting, & fishing—fully internationalized in three languages: English, Spanish and Polish. A dramatic new design update is coming early this year!

Hunt Illinois

All about hunting in Illinois, particularly relating to species, hunting on public lands, licenses and stamps, with interactive visualizations of species harvest & deer-vehicle accident data.

CICADA: Conservation Inclusive Construction and Development Archive

A trove of articles, documents, and links to resources throughout Illinois related to building with care for wildlife habitat and diversity.?

WILD

WILD is a multi-purpose portal to provide services to Illinois constituents, such as Nuisance Animal Removal Permits (https://2wav.com/blogPage/narp), permitting and reporting for Nuisance Wildlife Control Operators, with new services coming on board in 2025.

White-tailed Deer Illinois

Want to go deep on white-tailed deer? This site has deep content on the ecology and management of Illinois' signature cervid, with data visualizations, tools for reporting poaching and sick or dead deer.