Rewilding Your Backyard: Science to Boost Biodiversity and Climate Resilience

Good evening, everyone. How's everyone doing tonight? Well, thank you so much for joining us for this latest edition of our monthly Woodwell Climate Conversations series. I'm Wayne Walker. I'm the Chief Scientific officer here and a senior scientist, and I'll be serving as the moderator for tonight's conversation. But before we get started, I'd like to quickly go over a few housekeeping items. First, this evening's event will be recorded and livestreamed, so I'd like to welcome our virtual audience out there in the ether with us. Thank you for joining us. Second, our series is called Climate Conversations for a reason. We'd like to encourage back and forth discussion throughout the conversation, so don't hesitate to raise your hand, but I would only ask, because we're live streaming, if you could wait until the mic gets to you so that the people online can hear your question, that'd be greatly appreciated. And finally, we'd appreciate if everyone would silence their cell phones. Thank you so much. All right, with housekeeping out of the way, what is the Climate Conversation series all about? Well, this series was created for you, our audience, our friends, our supporters, hopefully some new faces out there in the audience to create a monthly informal gathering place to showcase the critical work being done here at Woodwell. And together with our partners, like Biodiversity Works to drive urgently needed climate action, we are here to demonstrate how science can lead to impact. We are here to provide insightful information on the latest solutions to the climate crisis. And perhaps more importantly, most importantly, we're here to foster community engagement, which I think is something we can all agree we could use a lot of right now. So, again, thank you all for joining us. So, without further ado, tonight's conversation is titled Rewilding youg Backyard Science to Boost Biodiversity and Climate Resilience. And it's my great pleasure to introduce the two leaders of tonight's conversation, Dr. Chris Neal of Woodwell Climate Research center and Dr. Luann Johnson of Biodiversity Works on Martha's Vineyard. Chris is an ecologist and a senior scientist here at Woodwell and the former director of the Ecosystem center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Much of Chris's work is focused on the Amazon, working to understand how deforestation and intensifying agriculture alter the flow of water and materials from land into and within streams and rivers. Closer to home, here on Cape Cod and in the Northeast, he studies how the choices we make along our coasts and our backyards affect water quality and biodiversity. Since 2012, Chris has worked with teams of natural and social scientists in cities around the United States to understand how people shape the ecological functions in what he refers to as the residential macro system. The large areas of North America devoted to single family housing or what we might otherwise think of as our backyards. So welcome. Chris Luann Johnson is wildlife biologist and the director of Biodiversity Works, a nonprofit organization on Martha's Vineyard with a mission to promote conservation of biodiversity through wildlife research and monitoring, while providing people with opportunities to engage in hands on nature study. Luann runs a project called Natural Neighbors, which enrolls interested homeowners and works to provide them with expert and individualized prescriptions for how they can rewild their yards. Welcome, Luann.

Thank you.

Pleasure to be here.

So I'd like to kick things off with you, Chris. Tell us more about this national project you're involved in and how you became interested in in research in suburban environments.

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Wayne. So, yeah, the story I'm going to tell is how I got involved in this, what's turned out to be a really fun and engaging project with other scientists around the country. And it started out in around 2011, and I was invited by a colleague at MBL at the time to participate in a group that was considering trying to do some science around what was going on in people's lawns. Lawns were this ubiquitous factor, you know, ubiquitous land use across the United States. And, and so we were trying to think of, well, what project could we write to the National Science foundation, which funds basic research in the United States, to look at lawns? And I said, I said, no, no, we're looking at this the wrong way. It would be way more interesting to think about whole yards instead of just the lawn components of how we shape our, our residential properties. And I sent around this picture and I said, with this question, I said, what city is this? And the point was it could be any city, it could be any suburban area of any city around the country. And it turns out the left is Boston and the right is Phoenix. And the only real difference you see is there's a few more swimming pools in Phoenix than in Boston. But it got us thinking about how can we study this as an ecosystem and what questions can we ask? And we devised this. So the rest of the science I'm going to talk about really comes from this team that put together a proposal to study this. And this was our question. And I have to admit we had a great title because we said, look, in all of these places, you're taking a natural ecosystem, if it's Falmouth or Boston, it's an eastern deciduous forest, and you're converting it into this savanna with houses, driveways and lawns. And if you're in la, you're taking a coastal scrub and you're making exactly the same habitat. And we said what we're doing is we're homogenizing suburban America. We're just taking all these natural systems that are different from each other and sort of pushing them toward this. This median. And so this was our hypothesis. And we have this great title called the Ecological Homogenization of Urban America. I think that's partly why we got funded. So what I want to talk about is some of the science. This group's been going since 2012. We've had two rounds of funding from National Science Foundation. It's been a great, fun team to be a part of. And we've got a lot of things to talk about, and we want to cover some of that. But that's my part. That's the science. What I want to do is hand off to Luanne and say, now she tries to take the science and say, well, inside that residential ecosystem or that macro system, because it's occurring all over North America, what can you do as a homeowner to push this system toward being more natural, being more supportive of biodiversity, being less harmful to the environment, and being more serving of reducing the impacts of climate change? And so those are the things that we're going to try to talk about. Take the science and then translate it into action in people's yards, which is sort of what Luann's been focusing on for several years now.

Thanks, Chris. So, let's see, we'll go here. I wanted to say a few words about where natural neighbors came from and the impetus for that program, which is part of where Biodiversity Works, came from as well. Doing wildlife work on Martha's Vineyard, I've done. I've tracked animals across the landscape, whether it be skunks with radio collars or followed river otter trails. And one of the things that I've learned is that if I show up in somebody's yard and I'm talking to a homeowner about wildlife in their yard is the first thing that they often say is. Is, oh, my God, that's so cool. I'm so excited that this animal, this plant, whatever is in my yard. And the second thing that I learned is that they want to help and they want to do the right thing. And what happens is that is, Chris has noted, is that we've been homogenizing the habitat, right? And through the processes of habitat fragmentation and urbanization. And so I've got a couple pictures here showing you Martha's Vineyard in 2001. This one area of Martha's Vineyard, you can see the heads of some of our great ponds here. And you can just see that between 2001 and 2024, we've had a little bit of development happening in this area. Right. And this is fragmenting habitat. Right. I'm going to just, just talk a moment about how a river otter might see this. So our river otters, if I can. There we go. They actually cross between the heads of all of these coves and they're moving across the landscape. Or maybe some of the birds that live in these open areas do as well. But once you put houses and lawns, whether it be infrastructure, roads, I might think about black racers, a snake that's been declining in our area. In here, all of the infrastructure that we're building and the habitat changes that we make are either creating barriers for wildlife or making the habitat maybe seem unsuitable. Or a yard might be introducing some things that are not beneficial to animals, like nighttime light, or people might be throwing yard debris out, or all sorts of things are happening in the landscape. And so Natural Neighbors is a perfect response to this because if someone's interested, they can reach out to us. We can come to your yard and we can look at the landscape around your yard before we make a site visit. And we can say, hey, you know, there's some opportunities here, there's some opportunities to do some good and to create some connectivity. And so our response to habitat fragmentation and urbanization is basically connectivity, creating connectivity and creating community. And we're trying to introduce our natural neighbors to one another and spread the word.

So, Chris, I have a question for you. Here at Woodwell, we think a lot.

About.

How land can contribute to what we refer to as nature based climate solutions. How we can manage the land to either store more carbon or pull carbon out of the atmosphere. I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit about the role that these suburban ecosystems can play as nature based climate solutions.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. And so we measure that. We've done a couple of different things. So in this project, the study design was engaging about 35 homeowners in the Boston suburban region, almost from New Hampshire down almost to Plymouth. And we measured a whole bunch of stuff. But one of the things we measured was the composition of the trees, the size of the trees, and hence the amount of carbon that those trees store. And we looked at them from a couple of different perspectives. One is, are they native trees or are they non native species? Because that ends up being important. And I want to talk about that a little bit because we've learned a bunch about the importance of native species. So one of the things I'll talk about Boston, one of the things we found was the suburbs have quite a bit of carbon, not quite as much as a natural forested area. So every time we studied grass, we had reference areas that were basically for New England forest. And we, so we measured how the carbon in yards and the trees composition in yards stacked up against the forest. And in fact the yards had about, in the leafy suburbs of Boston had about 2/3 to 3/4 of the carbon that the forest had. The forest is second growth, it's cut over. People actually protect big trees in yards. They take care of them, they prune them, they, you know, sometimes they spray them. Might not be the best thing, but. But what was interesting was that, that the carbon was that high. So there's a great potential. And in fact, Wayne and I just finished up a study on Martha's Vineyard where we looked at where is the carbon across the terrestrial or the land portion of Martha's Vineyard. And the biggest amount of carbon was in woodlands. The second biggest carbon in any habitat on the Vineyard was in suburban resident. Because it's a big area and because it's on the Vineyard, there's an aesthetic, you know, you should nestle your house in the woods and not clear cut your lot. Although that's maybe changing and hopefully we can push it back the other way. But there's a great potential to improve carbon storage on these residential lands by taking care of big trees. And of course, you know, as climate changes, there's this sense that, oh, trees are under threat, they're going to fall down, we need to cut them or there's conflict with putting solar on your house, which I personally experienced and was a hard decision to make. But when a tree falls down on your car, you decide that maybe the rest of that tree needs to go. And therefore I can put solar on my house. But there's a great potential for that. What we did find in Boston was interesting that there was a greater distribution towards bigger trees in suburbs than even in the natural forest, which surprised me because people take care of big trees, especially street trees. The other thing was a much higher percentage of them were non native trees. Things like Norway maples or sycamore maples or things that were. So that has, it's good they're storing carbon. But on the other hand, there's a downside to having non native trees, trees dominate a landscape. So what we're really aiming for is, yeah, let's grow big trees and let's make them native. Those are the two best things you can possibly do.

Luanne, can you talk a little bit more about the Natural Neighbors program? How large is the program? Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, some of the things that you, that you do with the individual landowners?

Sure. I did want to say, though, tying off of what you said, Chris, is that Susannah Lehrman and Desiree Narango did a study in 2023, and some of the statistics that they had in there was sort of about, were about land cover in the United States. And if you look at, even in the rural areas, houses and the areas the acreage that houses are on are like 70% of some rural areas. And in suburban areas, houses and house lots make up 24% in the United States. So a lot more than our conservation lands. And one of my taglines for natural neighbors is always, we are never going to save biodiversity if we don't include private lands. We can't do it with conservation lands, because your yard matters. Your yard is how wildlife connect between conservation lands. And so we really want everybody with natural neighbors to start thinking about there isn't this perimeter around your yard where nature begins outside of your yard. Right. And Rich Kauss, who runs the Natural Neighbors program, wrote a great blog post about lawns for Natural Neighbors last month. And one of the things he noticed is that sort of lawn originated as part of this idea of being able to see around your castle to defend it. Right. And whether you have a moat or a lawn. Right. And so it goes with that idea that my yard is here and nature is out there, and so we want to make that more permeable. So when we have Rich and Robin is our new person, we just hired on and they prep for a site visit. When they come to your yard and they think about the landscape context of where your yard is, they do some research on that. They look at overlays from natural heritage and endangered species program to see if you're in priority habitat. We want to make sure that we're making sound recommendations for somebody. And we also, when we come to someone's yard, we really think carefully about asking you questions about what it is that you like, what it is, what is your aesthetic. We try to meet people where they are. Whether or not you like snakes, are you afraid of Are you terrified of snakes? Are you afraid of bats? What are your issues? You know, and how can we meet you? Right.

What are your issues?

What are your issues? Yeah, the wildlife issues only. Yeah. And. And so we have some. Rich has some very lengthy conversations as he's walking around a yard. And we also do sort of a mini bioblitz on the yard. What habitats are represented here, what plant communities? And we look for opportunities. Where are the opportunities for us to promote biodiversity on this parcel? And we'd like to find out if you have neighbors who are interested. And so we haven't branched out too far into Falmouth, but I will say just take the moment right now to say Rich is willing to come do site visits over in Falmouth. If you can line up three people that want a site visit in a day, it can make it. And you want to pick him up at the ferry, you can sign up and I have brochures out there. Pick him up at the ferry, you can sign up and I have brochures out there. It's a free program. We have a grant funding our program right now. And he produces an individual report for you and for your yard that talks about the plants that you can plant. It talks about where. Where you might want to plant those and what type of. We're looking for resources for wildlife, whether it be food, water, shelter, space in your yard. It can be. It could even be something about you have an opportunity where you have some bare ground and it's nice mineral soil, terrific for ground nesting bees that don't sting you. We love that. Don't mess with that. And where can we, you know, how attached are you to this acre of lawn you have? What are you doing with it? Do you have grandkids or kids that play on it, or is it just out there for you to mow it? Well, we have some great opportunities for you to help, you know, help reduce carbon emissions by converting that to a meadow that you don't have to do as much with or thinking about, you know, because every landscaper that comes to a property mowing is carbon emissions, right? For them to get there, for them to run, even if they're running an electric mower, unless they're driving all electric. So anyways, lots of opportunities. Yeah.

Can I jump in? I just say that I think what we try to promote when we talk about this is you don't have to take this on all at once. Just be incremental in how much habitat you change in any one year, because it can be work Right. And it can be very, very rewarding work, but it can also be a lot of work.

Slow landscaping.

So slow landscaping. I like to think about messy landscaping. Like, neatness is not your friend in terms of being environmentally friendly. And I think just in terms of. So part of our study nationally was we surveyed about 10,000 people and we asked them all kinds, you know, all kinds of questions about why you do what you do in your yard. And the story is that we ask them questions, you know, do you care? What do you care about? Well, the number one things that people care about is it has to look nice and be easy to take care of. Those consistently rose to the top. The things that I care about, you know, do you want to mitigate climate change? No, those were very low on the list. Do you want to, you know, preserve water quality? No, not even on people's radars. The things that. But, but, but hopefully we want to raise those, raise those issues as reasons to do things in your yard. And we're not saying eliminate lawns. I think, you know, there's a place for lawns. But even if you have lawn, there are ways to treat it that are much more environmentally friendly. Like in our neck of the woods. You know, people know I've been advocating for nitrogen reductions in Falmouth for decades now. And so fertilizing your Lawn is about 15% of all the nitrogen that goes into estuaries in Falmouth. You know, we could eliminate that by just not fertilizing lawns. Enough nitrogen comes down from rainfall to fertilize your. Will it look as green and as absolutely neat? No. So you have. It's the aesthetic that, like, accepts some slow landscaping, accepts some messier looking landscaping, but you can do lots of things to sort of neaten it up around some very few edges to get the look that looks like it's cared for, looks like you have some control over your landscape, which you always. It's just a natural human thing to want, but at the same time not devoting large areas to being a negative in terms of the nutrients. So it turns out that when we. So we took the results of that questionnaire and then we looked at the science results that came from houses owned by people who answered that survey. And lo and behold, the people who like neatness in their yards had lower biodiversity in their yards when we measured it. So it's very, you know, it's very real. We tried to connect what people want to do with what the actual outcome is, and we have a chance. I want to Talk about. We had very different and very encouraging results when we looked at lawns, or not lawns, but yards, of people who actually tried to manage for wildlife. And we could actually see that they were moving the needle. They had a higher proportion of native plants, they had more plant diversity, they had, you know, sort of lower soil nitrogen concentrations, which is a good thing. Which means that it sort of comes with this suite of things that you're doing that aren't. You're not adding a ton of fertilizer, you're not hiring a lawn care company. So all of those, you know, it's the collective suite of things that you do in your yard that really matter.

I think it does.

And so I'm curious, Owen, as part of the work that, that you're doing, following on some of the science that Chris was talking about, is monitoring a part of your programs? Are you tracking what's happening over time in some of these lawns from where people started to where they end up one, two, three years down the road?

Well, with building capacity and adding another staff person, that's one of the things we're adding this year, is looking at more post monitoring and how we can do that better. But one of the things we do is we offer follow up visits for natural neighbors. And usually in your report and when you get a report from natural neighbors, Rich makes recommendations, lots of recommendations. And what we ask is that if you implement three of our recommendations, just three, what we're going for is you get one of these signs for your yard. I'm bringing life to my landscape with natural neighbors. Right. And so this is the carrot to be implementing some recommendations. And it could be as simple as maybe doing your outdoor lighting, adding a water feature and planning a native plant pack. Right. You could tackle those three things and get yourself a sign.

How many total people do you have signed up?

We have 335 people that we visited yards and getting people to do, to accept or invite you for a follow up visit is sometimes people are going, I'm not ready. Or this is. So we've done 24 follow up visits and 23 follow up visits. And 12 of those have earned a sign. And then they're like, oh, I didn't get my sign. So no, no. And so what we're really interested in, and we've been working with Sakiko Isamichi, who is a Martha's Vineyard Vision Fellow, in understanding better these barriers to planting native. And so Chris mentioned barriers. People want it to look nice, they want it to be easy, they have a lot of criteria. Rich often says that he has to do marriage counseling on his natural neighbors visit because one of the spouses will be very neat and tidy. And they're like, oh no, we're not doing that. And the other spouse is, but honey, I want this or that. And he'll be like, all right, well how about this section of the yard for this and that section of the yard for that. And let's figure out like how we can divide things up, you know, so. And about the biodiversity piece of it, I'll also say that Rich did a follow up visit at a site last year. I remember him telling me this, that they had hydrangeas, blue hydrangeas, which are not native, planted up against the house, but they were interspersed with a new native shrub, sweet pepper bush. And at the time the sweet pepper bush was in bloom and so were the hydrangeas. But Rich was able to say, I just want you to notice, where are all the pollinators? They were all over that sweet pepper bush and they were ignoring the blue hydrangeas. So it was really just a perfect opportunity and a perfect teaching moment for him to say, like, you know, you can have your blue hydrangeas, but here's an opportunity for you to see the impact for yourself.

Can I make one more comment and then maybe ask questions from the audience? So I just want to get in this. There's been a lot of science recently, I think really fascinating science on the value of native plants and sort of why, you know, talk about plant native and why that's important. So here are some reasons why it's important. Native plants have evolved in concert with native insects, mostly leaf eating insects, which are Lepidoptera, which are butterflies and moths. They've co evolved. There's been this arms race between the plants producing chemicals and the insects being able to tolerate the chemicals. That dance hasn't occurred between the insects and the non native plants. The insects don't do as well on non native plants. And so if you look at the literature now in growing literature, and there's a few papers that I always refer back to by this woman named Desiree Narango, who is at the Vermont center for Eco Studies, who was on our project as a postdoc and she looked at the caterpillar abundances in yards on native plants and on non native plants and it was like night and day, much higher abundance. You're creating a food web in your yard if you plant native plants and that food web goes up to birds. And she did this remarkable work with Carolina chickadees in the D.C. suburbs, where she found that the chickadees in yards with high proportions of native plants were delivering more food items to the young in the nest boxes and fledging more young. And that the threshold for that was about 70% native plants in a yard. And that's been borne out in the caterpillar studies and it's also been borne out in sort of her work on which species are the champions at harboring food webs. And it turns out we're lucky. It's oaks. We have lots of oaks. So you don't have to, you know, you don't have to look too far. We've got plenty of native oaks that will come into our yard with little encouragement that serve this dysfunction. But that's really the reason. And I think, you know, yes, pollinators, but it's also these, these food webs that are created by, by native plants leading to native moths and butterflies in yards. And of course, you know, spraying, even, even natural or, you know, BT based kinds of sprays are hit a lot of non target insects. So we would discourage any of that as a management practice. But what you're trying to do is cultivate these food webs.

Years ago, Manomet did a study on the fruits in the fall that the birds, migratory birds, were eating. And it was a great study because it showed that people think, let's say there's a lot of pollinators visiting this bee balm plant, or there's a lot of birds eating bittersweet. Just because they're eating it, it doesn't mean that it's good for them. And so they analyzed a lot of these fruits and saw that they weren't nearly as nutritious as a lot of the native. So you may not know this, but poison ivy is one of the most nutritious berries for birds out on the landscape. And it's a surprising plant, but it is also gobsmackingly beautiful in the fall. That is a beautiful vine. It's vibrant colors, has these little berries on it. The birds at the time when they most need it, they have food. And poison ivy was so beautiful that when the colonists came over here, they actually collected it and took it back to gardens in England and planted it because they thought that shiny green leaves are so beautiful. So, you know, natural neighbors is also about education. So when we're out in yards, we're often having to identify invasive plants and native plants. And so we're encouraging people like, you know, that bittersweet you got going There is not great for the birds. Let's see if we could trade that out for something else. They'll eat it. But, you know, it's like Dairy Queen, you know, like I said, you know, I had people that were starting a seed library, and I said, well, who's vetting these seeds for pollinators? You know? And they're like, well, what do you mean? I was like, well, they may not be great plants.

They.

They may. Just because the pollinators feed on them doesn't mean it's great for them. Somebody might watch Dairy Queen when it opens in spring on Martha's Vineyard and think that that is where you want to feed your kid. Right. But just because they go there, it doesn't mean it's the best place for them. And so viburnums are a great alternative. Yeah.

So should we ask for questions?

Absolutely, Absolutely. This is a conversation right here.

I have a question about a definition of native, because I have a lot of plants that I would sort of. I mean, that I know are native, like sweet pepper bush and viburnum and things like that. And I have cedar trees and so on. They are native.

But I also have a lot of.

Plants like rhododendrons, azaleas, mountain laurels that I bought at a nursery, and they're hybrids. Now, do you consider a plant that its ancestors lived in this environment to be native? Or once you go hybrid and you buy it in a nursery, is it no longer native? What's native?

Do you want to take it?

Well, I'll try, yeah. Oh, go ahead. This is a much debated question among people who do this kind of stuff.

So within the Natural Neighbors program, we consider a native plant to be the plants that were here before colonists arrived. That's what we consider our natives. Now, rhododendrons and azaleas do grow naturally in the wild in the East. And so the question is, is it something that would be growing in your region or in your area naturally? And if people can't get local genotypes, you know, a local genotype plant, then we will say, you know, get what you can. If it's, you know, if they're looking, if we might recommend some grasses, if you want some different structure in your garden, like tall grasses, short glasses and grasses, and people might be getting a switchgrass or a panicum, Right. And they make variegated panicums and panicums and things like that. I'm like, I'll take it. I'll take anything but Chinese silvergrass right now. Like, you know, what, like, do what you can. Try and go as native as you can because that. That switchgrass seed is going to be around all winter and feeding birds. You won't see birds feeding on Chinese silver grass. You're just going to see those seeds blowing everywhere and invading everything and showing up in our grasslands. And I can't wait for that plant to show up on the banned plant list in Massachusetts because it's really becoming a problem. Yeah, yeah.

I would largely agree that, you know, there are the botanical definitions of native. There's a plants of Massachusetts, a flora of Massachusetts, which has native lists and, you know, by county, by county. And I wouldn't go that far in making decisions. And the other thing is, we have to think about what plants like American holly, Ilex opaca, is going wild like it's a Scott. We're at the northern edge of its range and it's coming into Falmouth. It's a native plant, makes berries. It's not fairly nice plant, stays green and pretty easy to grow because it's invading a lot of places. But it's at the edge of its range and it's coming north because winters are milder. So that's a native plant, and that's a perfectly marvelous plant to have. Yeah. So. So the definition is not absolutely fixed, but there are some sort of standard lists to go to.

Up here in the front.

Next.

Hi. I actually want to sneak in with two questions, if I can quickly. One of them. One of them is, what do you think about bird feeders, particularly in the summer? And the other one is that I've tried planting native plants in our yard and they don't grow, but non native plants do. So I have a question about that. I can answer both.

Yeah, go, go. Yeah.

All right. Bird feeders first. My standard is, is that bird feeders come down May 1 and that you don't feed. Birds don't need seed in the summer. Seed tends to spoil quickly in the summer. They're more interested in protein to feed their young. Concentrating them at feeders can be a problem. And it can cause territorial defenses and stuff and spread germs and all sorts of stuff, which you definitely don't want when they're feeding young. So I try to plant it. I do feed in the winter. I try to have multiple things around here and there and never overfeed. Let the birds clean it up. And so I don't. If I'm putting a feeder up, I don't put feeders up usually until some. Until November and all the Birds need in the summer is water, clean, fresh water. Give them that you can have. If you want to have a hummingbird feeder, be prepared to have multiple, but better yet, plant plants that feed hummers. So onto your plant's knot. Working your native plants not staying. One of the misconceptions about planting native plants is that you just plant them and leave them and you don't have to do anything. And that's not true. Native plants need some tending in the first two years. They need to be watered regularly until they get established. You also need to make sure that you plant them in the right location and that they're selected for that right soil type. And that's one of the things we try to help you do. There is an association for the Preservation of Cape Cod, has a planting native website, as I understand it, and it's a nice one. I've been to it. We just created one for PlantLocal MV. We have some nice downloadable guides that would be applicable to Falmouth there. So if you go to plantlocal mv, it's a collaboration of all of us and there's some stuff and I have a brochure from that that you could download and so yeah, I need more specifics about your yard to be able to help you.

Hi, I'd like to continue the question conversation about what is native, bearing in mind climate change. So anise hyssop bird planted around here, quite common, appeared in my yard just out of the blue. It's a fantastic pollinator plant. If you have a vegetable garden, however, not native, not considered native, for instance, by the apcc because it's. It wasn't here in pre colonial times. It came to us from Virginia. But as climate change advances and we become more like a Virginia climate, you're going to have both plants and the insects that they feed and depend upon. It came to us from Virginia. But as climate change advances and we become more like a Virginia climate, you're going to have both plants and the insects that they feed and depend upon for their life cycle. Moving creeping northwards. How do you account for that? I mean, what is native here might be moving for their life cycle, moving creeping northwards. How do you account for that? Upwards towards Canada? And we might be requiring plants that come from Virginia. So I'm going to tackle that one because that's a very insightful question and it's actually something we're grappling with in the science and restoration community. So we've been doing some work here at Woodwell and we created this group called The Sand Plain grassland network in 2016. And so we're coming up, I mean what is native here might be moving up on almost 10 years. And we worry about these questions. If we're trying to restore a grassland on Martha's Vineyard or Cape Cod, should we actually be using seed stock from Long island from remnant grasslands on Long island because that will be pre adapted to the climate. If you look at the national climate assessments, they have these amazing maps of North Carolina marching north into New England and that's what's happening. And so this business of assisted migration or what I kind of term assisted restoration, where we really need to think about now you want them native genotypes, you don't want them sort of farm bred plants because those will be selected for, have traits that do well in a nursery but not in the natural environment. But I think we have to think about that. And I think I allow anise hyssop into my yard because because it's native south of here and it has a bunch of great qualities and probably would be one of those things that moves into the right habitat.

Just to tack onto that in a natural neighbor's visit. We're not interested in telling people to take stuff out of their yard that isn't native. That's not what we do. If you have an invasive, we're going to tell you we'd really like to see that gone. If you've got Chinese silvergrass, we're like, oh my God, could you please, please get rid of that? And a few other things like the Russian olive and bittersweet, all of the things we're going to help you try and tackle those. But as far as other things, and certainly not native to this continent, we're definitely not interested in seeing but something from the southern area that might be expanding north. Aok Linda how do you push back against landscapers who come into your yard and say, oh, silvergrass will look so beautiful here? Followed by where do you buy native plants? Yes, landscapers do push silver grass. And so our common refrain for that is it is pretty. But you know what, there's a lot of natives that are just that are pretty too. And they actually provide food for birds and a service that Chinese silvergrass doesn't. And Chinese silvergrass is actually a bully plant and it takes over and it expands areas beyond your yard. So it's going to be a nuisance. It's a nuisance plant is usually how I describe it. Native plants are becoming more and more of interest to landscapers. So our plant, local mv Initiative on Martha's Vineyard. We've been really reaching out to all the land, the nurseries on the island. We've picked the top 20 plants. We've grouped them into different groups. Damp Divas is one of our groups. We have Sun Seekers is another group of plants that we have. Shady Savants. We have, you know, a lot of different groups. So we tried to make it easy for people with these top 20 to know where to plant them, where to find them. And we're getting the nurseries interested in stocking those plants so that we can sell them. And so I think we'd like to do that in Falmouth as well. But I do have resources here for you and you'll get these. But I did. There are some native plants. Solidago Native Plants is here on the Cape. He grows some native plants. The Native Plant Trust does have in Framingham. You can get plants from them. Wild Seed project sells some native plants. So about this relationship with Poly Hill Arboretum. Yes.

To provide synergism between you have your program and then they have a place to sell, to propagate and sell plants. Yeah, we need more of those.

Yeah. And we do do a native plant sale with Poly Hills. So we, we create plant packs from Poly Hills native plant sale for people. So one of our plant packs is this plant sale that's coming up from Biodiversity Works and Natural Neighbors is going to be a garden. It's. I think it's going to be called a bee friendly kit because we did a, we did a study in farm plots across Martha's Vineyard. Eight different farms with planting with the Betsy and Jesse Fink Family Foundation. We did a, we planted these pollinator patches. And so these packs are going to have golden rods and asters that attract some of the predatory wasps that are going to be beneficial for your garden too in the late season. So. So anyways, we curate these packs and we could try and figure out how to way to get them across on the ferry to have you pick up in Woods Hole or something. If you guys wanted to do that, we can work on that, help move some plants out of Poly Hill. I'm interested in the landscaper problem also trying to figure out how to get a room full of landscapers sitting here listening to you instead of a bunch of us who are thinking outside the box. And I'm glad to hear that on the Vineyard you're, you're figuring out how to cross that chasm. But aside from the apcc, which is not doing outreach to professional landscaping organizations, are they.

Yes, It's a new program that's just developed.

But how can we get landscapers to stop planning privet and stop getting homeowners to want privet hedges? And how can we reach. I mean, there are mobs of them, and they're all running around being destructive. How do we reach?

They're not. Yeah, I think they're not the only issue. But I think, you know, one of the ways is I think we have to make inroads. You know, like, I was having a conversation, you know, one house in one neighborhood, you know, when we stopped mowing, our front yard was one neighbor who's no longer there but, you know, would stop and say, you know, like, what are you doing? Is this is, you know, you're dragging the house prices in the neighborhood down? And I would say, well, you know, first of all, it's my property. And second of all, you know, just give it a little time. And it does take a little bit of time. It looks different for a while, and I still mow three or four feet along the edges, and I do nod and make some concessions to people who have a different aesthetic. But I think having what I've witnessed is having a house or two that goes that route sort of encourages conversation and encourages others. There's a young couple in our neighborhood now who have their own meadow and sort of after. And I'm, you know, handing them as many plants as I can and things like that to get it started. And, you know, eventually there will be landscapers who are known that you can hire. There are on the vineyard, there are here in Falmouth, people who sort of specialize in this. And, you know, we got to get them catering to more and more people, obviously. But I think one of the ways is to make inroads, you know, just sort of make inroads in every neighborhood. And so talk about the scaling that Tom is trying to do, right? In terms of. We're trying to get this idea that figure out, well, where are other. Sorry, where are other programs around the country that are trying to do what Luann is doing in a sense of having natural neighbors or promoting native landscaping? And so there's a group on Martha's Vineyard led by our colleague Tom Chase, who's surveying all of those and trying to figure out what works, you know, what makes. You know, what makes. Why does natural neighbors have 350 people in some group in Portland, you know, Oregon, or maybe that's not a good example because they probably have a lot of people in Portland, Oregon, but, you know, Somewhere in Cleveland, you know, doesn't have as many people and trying to figure out, well, what works. So there's a science. There's a science of people that goes along with this that's equally important. Like, we surveyed people and tried to meet them on their terms and say, you know, like, okay, well, what would it. What is the barrier? What would it take? You know, is it that you can't find the plants? Is it. You don't know what to plant? Is it, you know, what. What is it that's. Or you can't hire somebody to do it? What is it that's the barrier to nudging your yard toward a more wild and functional state? Yeah.

So we actually know what a lot of the barriers are. And in our plant local MV campaigns and the brochures I have out there, we actually have section, plant this. Not that we have a lot of. A lot of the things addressed there, but what's going to drive the change with landscapers, with landscape architects, with homeowners, is a movement, is a grassroots movement of people going to nurseries and saying, where are your native plants? I want to see native plants. When you go to the nursery, every time you go to buy something, where are your native plants? Ask for them. Because they have customers asking. They're going to be like, I got people asking for native plants and we don't have native plants. Right. And so the landscape designers tell us, oh, it's the clients. The clients tell us, oh, my designer is the one who recommended that. The landscapers say, oh, it's the landscape architects or it's the clients. Everybody's passing the buck. So the only person who's going to make this change happen is all of you. And convincing somebody. And it. Like I said, slow landscaping is fine. Micro movements are fine. If it's a pollinator pack in a. In a big bin on your deck, great. I don't care if it's a piece in your garden, whatever. Do. Do something. Just do something. Start somewhere. Start somewhere with native plants because it's really rewarding. You're going to see the response to it. Right. And give somebody a plant, a native plant pack as a gift for Mother's Day or wherever those are options.

Yeah. Just two questions. I go to Sower's Nursery. It's up on Sandwich Road, and they know exactly what are native plants. And it's nice to talk to the guy who talks about that sort of stuff. But a lot of your research is.

Past data and relationships.

If you could go forward and that's dangerous? Would the non native plants become more attractive? Or is that relationship good and bad going to stay forever? Is the relationship between good plants, native plants, non native plants right now is not good. If you could fast forward, would non native plants adapt better to the ecology over time? Are they always going to be the bad guys? I guess it depends. In some ways it depends on the pace of evolution, right? Yeah. I mean, how will those. If the landscape is filled, it is filled in suburban areas with a lot of non native plants. I mean, often there we found, I don't know, a thousand species of plants in 35 yards in Boston. And something like that was about 20% of the entire Massachusetts flora in relatively amazing diversity. It's dominated by non native plants, less in Boston than in some other cities. So we've created these landscapes. Clearly insects are going to adapt to that landscape, but it'll take time. So I don't think in our lifetimes or our kids lifetimes or our grandkids lifetimes that that relationship will be completely undone. That will stick, especially because there are, you know, there is this matrix of more native habitat around. So I think that relationship will persist. Yeah, yeah.

One of the great things about maybe is that it's an opportunity for you to tackle invasives in your yard. Because April and May is when they all start leafing out. Because they leaf out earlier, they get a competitive advantage. They're from different areas, especially if the ones from China. So right now, bittersweet is easy to find, wineberry is easy to find. Rip it out. You know, honeysuckle's all abloom and the poison ivy isn't really out in its full blossom yet. You know, it's not really leafed out. So it's an opportunity to put on a pair of rubber boots and really get in there. Even if you're just cutting that stuff back, cutting it down to the ground, you're making some progress. And so some of these invasives are gaining an advantage because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. They're more productive, but they've been given an advantage because somebody cleared something, created a clearing and there were seed banks nearby and so they seed in. And so it's a matter of just being a steward. Right. We're trying to, I think Tom Chase, our friend we talked about from Village and Wilderness, like one of his campaigns, has always been to create a culture of stewardship. And that's that piece I was talking about is I, I would like you all to not think that nature stops at the edge of your Yard, you're a steward wherever you go. And. And we want to have that relationship with nature that we are. We're part of nature, we're in relationship with it, and we're neighbors. Right. So native peoples thought differently about nature and their interaction with it than we do.

Yeah. Let's go to a question.

Could you go back to the slide.

Showing Boston and Arizona?

Sure. A big city.

There. Okay. So my question is partially an observation. More and more second home owners. I'm just going to speak about Falmouth, although I know it's an epidemic, everywhere are putting up fences and literally fencing in their yards. And so I'm just curious between. And I know I'm at about, what, 5,000ft on this one. Can you tell me if there are more fences in the Phoenix versus Boston and our fences? Is there such a thing? Good fences make good neighbors? I have no idea. We didn't think of that. We thought of a lot of things, but we didn't think about trying to measure fences as a way. What we did, we focused on responses that. I'm going to get to your question, but we focused on responses that we would think would happen at the scale of a yard. Insects that live in the ground, insects that live on trees. We could quantify bees flying around. You know, could. Could respond at that. One acre, you know, half acre scale. Birds don't respond at the half acre scale. They respond to a whole neighborhood. So, you know, some things would be much more affected by fences than others, especially things moving around. They might increase the vulnerability of animals trying to climb over or get over. I don't. You. You've done a lot more work on barriers and things than Luann's been involved in trying to build tunnels under roads on Martha's Vineyard to facilitate black racers and things. And she has these amazing pictures of game cameras with sort of otters squeezing themselves through these little tunnels under roads, or black racers actually using these. So those kinds of barriers add up. I think so. Probably they do matter at some level. Some fences are pretty permeable, like wooden fences that lots of chipmunks and things can easily go under or. Yeah. So, Vicki.

Oh, my question was, when you were talking about landscapers, has anybody thought of talking to realtors about making your neighborhood a native pollinator neighborhood so that it looks like it's a great neighborhood to move into? You know, realtors are a tough nut to crack. I gotta tell you. You never know what direction they're gonna go with something. You know, they. And to get them to agree on something is just, you know, I mean, realtors are the ones who've told everybody now that they need a pool, right? So we've got a proliferation of pools. Talk about carbon footprint, right? And so I've been trying to think of how to do that, but it's this idea of the messy aesthetic of native plants, and I'm trying to get around that, so I'm even trying to meet people. When I was at Donna Roma's last Saturday, we had a native plant outreach event there, and somebody was looking at the pictures of plants, and one of the women said to me was, but they're just so messy. And I was like, all right, what about this one? Why don't we just look at butterfly weed? How about if we try that? You know? And so I. With realtors, sometimes it's the. You know, I have. I have a natural neighbor who rents their house in the summer, and they're like, yeah, my realtor said I can't have a meadow because they won't be able to rent it. Now, is it the realtor who's driving the market? Or, you know, I'm like, well, right. And so I think it is a matter of. But once again, we need to create the demand. We, the people need to say, we want meadows and we like native plants. And so if you're renting an Airbnb somewhere else, you need to say, do they have native plants? Maybe they'll start planting them.

I was wondering if there are any beneficial effects of garlic mustard. It's just. I mean, you can go after bittersweet because it's sort of a discrete item, but the garlic mustard is just. I live across the street at Treetops, and it's just everywhere. And I've gotten ticks twice now trying to. Just right at the edge. Just saying, oh, well, they're not going.

To be a tick right at the.

Edge, because I can't resist pulling some of it out, even though it's hopeless.

But that's a pretty recent invasive.

But it has little flowers. Does it have any beneficial things?

It makes great pesto. Yeah. Yeah, you can eat it.

You can't eat enough of it.

You can't eat it. So we. We've been. I've been hand. I've been pulling garlic mustard for the last three weeks everywhere I go. But you can. But I understand the concern about tick. You can smother it with black plastic, but you need to keep that black plastic. You really need to solarize it and keep after it for, I think, a couple of years. And you can get rid of a patch. Yeah. That way. But you know what, just start somewhere. Start with a section of it. Right. That's what I say. When people are overwhelmed like we have, we have. The invasive plant brigade is one of our solutions to build community and capacity and natural neighbors. Because somebody might have a patch of bittersweet, but they can't tackle it by themselves. So you can go volunteer two hours in somebody else's yard with the invasive plant brigade and then the brigade will come to your house for two yards. Right. So, so we've been building that as a way of managing invasives. And so it's just like, you know, maybe you can't do the whole patch of bittersweet, but you can take, take a two foot section and start managing it, cut it all back and as much as you can in the fall or in the winter when everything's dead, just go in there and cut it all down and then keep managing as it comes back. Just do something. Start somewhere.

It is remarkable though, that these new things are coming. Porcelainberry is one in falma that we didn't have much. Now it's everywhere. So things get spread around very quickly and then the climate has changed to facilitate its survival. The winters are much milder and conditions are right for these things. So that aspect of things isn't going to get better anytime soon as the way the climate is changing. Nancy.

So I have a question about patch size. So my yard size is my yard size, but I have neighbors. And so I'm curious for like, biodiversity I can imagine, like, for connectivity, it seems like it would be important. But I'm also curious for carbon, like, does it matter where, like the distribution of folks who may have gardens that are, you know, or yards that are thinking about this, or is it fine for me just to be in my bubble? Like, should I try? I understand you have the sign, so I want to recruit my neighbors, but should we come to you as a group? And, and do you think about the spatial distribution of where these are? And I also am curious about that, not just for biodiversity, but also for carbon.

So you have control over your yard. You don't necessarily have control over whether a neighbor takes down trees. So I would say your best bet is to manage your own lot, to maximize. Well, it matters only if it's scaled right. If we could get people invested in increasing forest cover throughout multiple yards, in multiple towns, in multiple states, I think at that scale it doesn't matter whether you're a block. Right. I think what luann is trying to promote is that if you look at the landscape as a whole, don't make a corridor that cuts a connected piece of forest, or if you can reconnect cut pieces, you know, pieces of forest. And I think, you know, conservation groups, the 300 committees, doing this all the time, they're thinking, oh, that lot. Yeah. We don't usually go after two acre lots, but that particular lot is really important because it connects, you know, bigger areas. So think, if you think of your yard in that context, I think, I.

Think it helps, Sue. I mean, we do look at those opportunities with yards that are abutting or neighbors that are abutting one another, and maybe, maybe they have a neighborhood association that has rules about how tall your grass can be or in the fronts or along roads or whatever. So maybe your backyards are near one another and you don't have fences, then you could create one big pollinator patch together. You could work together on removing invasives that cover both of your yards. So you can do overlapping projects where you, where your yards come together. And we'd love to see efforts like that where you can create a larger patch together by combining areas of your yard that overlap or put your pollinator meadows next to each other where your front yards overlap. Or, you know, opportunities like that. Create a. Create a small water feature together. A water feature.

Or.

You know, I mean, there's. There's a lot of opportunities where having yards that abut one another or are near one another can create a stepping stone, especially with pollinators. I think it's valuable.

Last question.

Emily. I'm it. I have two words.

Leaf blowers.

We know how destructive leaf blowers are for habitat, insects, bird populations. We have people.

Yes.

I've been involved with two attempts in Falmouth to ban leaf blowers. Town meeting. And it's been a disaster. You should excuse the expression. Our landscapers are so opposed to it. And people, one of the other problems we have here in Falmouth is that we've got an increasing number of summer residents who are not here in the winter, but they've got the landscapers coming multiple times to blow all the leaves off their precious lawns. And I know on the Vineyard you have had some success with, with bringing a leaf blower band to town meeting. Is that true? Yes. Any suggestions.

For the leaf blower legislation and bringing them to town meeting? VCS took the lead on that Vineyard Conservation Society, and they did a great job working with each town. And so we do have. We have now, and depending on which town limits on which. Well, we're going to be phasing out gas powered leaf blowers by 2028, I believe from every town on Martha's Vineyard so far that passed. And every town amended this legislation so it was a little different. No leaf blowing on Sundays. I believe in several towns and there's certain months of the year too. So I think phasing that legislation in is the way VCS took that approach and that's a wise approach.

Right.

But I would encourage you to look at VCS's website and again, the movements leave the leaves, save the stems. Telling landscapers, hey, leave the leaves. I'm fine with the leaves. I'm not here working on that messaging and letting people know that that's actually the cool thing to do, the right thing to do. It's the local way of doing things. You want to be a local, you want to live local, you want to buy local. No leaf blowing. Right. So our slogan for plant Local MV is Love the Island. Plant local. Love the Cape. Plant local. Right. You just keep working that information into the public.

Folks, unfortunately we are out of time. Thank you so much for all your great questions. Round of applause for Chris and Luann. Please save the date for our next climate conversations on June 11th with John Holdren, our former president here and former science advisor to President Obama. So please join us then. Thank you so much.

Have a good night. Sa. Sam. Sa.