Tucked away off S 900, just West the Jordan River, you’ll find the Fred and Ila Fife Wetland Preserve. Serving as one of the city’s two wetland areas, Fife is a piece of our Salt Lake City Natural Lands that has been a recent source of educational opportunity and a vision of stewardship for the future.
In 2010, Fife was established thanks to distributed mitigation funds after the Chevron oil spill. This space, taken on by the Salt Lake City Department of Public Lands, is a continual restoration project. The inclusion of a manmade oxbow lake serves as a refuge for birds, land dwelling mammals, and aquatic life alike. Native vegetation planting efforts in the preserve serve to repopulate the soil each year with a more sustainable ecosystem. While there are still challenges to overcome in fully restoring this space, we’ve seen the fruits of our effort in the breath of biodiversity discovered in our insect population.
Since 2020, the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) has been spearheading citizen science projects across Fife Wetlands. With the guidance of the NHMU’s Entomology and Malacology Collections Manager, Christy Bills, over 500 unique species have been collected and preserved.
The collection, that is far more than a collection of insects, will be a part of a larger exhibit coming to the museum in February 2026. It is a testament to the work the public is doing to bring forth Fife as the preserve that it is. It is a physical letter to the efforts our team is putting forth to slowly, but surely, restore the space.
We owe a big thank you to all those who come to this space looking for ways to highlight what it is now and what it will be moving forward. This celebration of preservation would not be possible without the involvement of the Natural History Museum, iNaturalist and the data it provides for us, or all those who have spent their time cataloging and collecting what they’ve found in Fife.
To view what has been cataloged so far, please continue to this link.
You can stay up to date on the current and upcoming exhibits at the Natural History Museum, you can visit their web page.