Webinar: Mild to Wild - How Our Backyard Choices Impact Our Environment

Good afternoon everybody. I'm Heather Goldstone, Chief Communications Officer for Woods Hole Research Center. Welcome to our Wednesday webinar. These are becoming a regular thing. This is our 2020 Spring K NAB webinar series, originally prompted of course by some changes in how we do business as a result of COVID 19, but quickly becoming a highlight at least of my week as we get to highlight some of the work of our scientists and also take your questions. For those of you who are new to Woods Hole Research center and our work, we are an organization based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, a lovely part of the world that I think you're going to get to see a little bit of today. We have about several dozen world class scientists working on issues related to climate change and ecological change resulting from human activities. We work with a global network of partners and you will see some of our partners and collaborators on our panel discussion today. And I'm really excited for today's webinar because I have a backyard and I've wondered for a long time how to make my backyard more environmentally friendly, a better habitat, a better place for wildlife. And I think right now in particular, I mean, it's spring. And so those of us who are gardeners and yard work enthusiasts are perhaps getting started on those kinds of projects. But in particular this spring, a lot of us are home a lot more than we would be. And I think there's a real thirst among people to know what can we do right now? What can we do that is good for ourselves, for our communities and for our world? And so I'm really pleased to be able to bring you this mild to wild webinar today, talking about the science of the ecosystems really that are in our backyards, our front yards, the areas that surround our homes and what we can do to better manage those for wildlife, for the environment and for climate. Before we get to that though, I'd like to try to foster a little bit of connectedness through this. And I was just on a webinar last night and for those of you on the participant side of things.

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Can be an odd experience. As I said, I experienced last night, very much so, where you feel like you're kind of floating and a little bit blind. If you were coming into an event at Woods Hole Research center, you'd be walking into a lovely auditorium. You'd be able to look around the room, see who else was there, see who, you know, what the audience is like, maybe chat with some people before the presentation. And of course we can't do all of that with a webinar. But we would like you to get to know us a little better us to get to know you a little better and maybe even know a little bit about each other. So to give you a sense, right now we have about 190 participants on this webinar. So welcome to all of you and thank you so much. And to get to know each other just a little bit, I'm going to do something that is becoming a traditional. That's to start with a little easy question for you. I'm going to launch a poll and ask you how old you are. That should have popped up on your screen now. And you can just tell us how old you are. I'm seeing at the moment most of our audience today in the over 50 age range, about 80%, about 15% in the 30 to 50 age range, 4% in the 1929 age range, age and just one participant under 18. Welcome to you and thank you for joining us. So I'm going to now end that poll. I can actually share those results for you if you'd like to actually take a look at that for a moment. So that's a little bit about who's in the audience today. And we're also going to get to know some of the features of Zoom here. So there should also be at the bottom of your screen the ability to raise your hand. So I'd like to know where you're joining us from today because one of the great things about webinars that we don't have when we have an event in our auditorium at Woods Hole Research center is the ability to connect with people anywhere in the world, not just in our own backyard. So tell me where you're from with a raise of your hands. If you are from New England, right here, close to Woods Hole Research center, go ahead and raise your hand and let us know. So I'm seeing, wow, more than half of our attendees, a little over 100 of you from the New England area. So welcome. If you are from the US and east of the Mississippi, but not specifically the Northeast. If you already raised your hand, go ahead and leave it up. Let's see if we can get to everybody having their hand in the air together. So if you're from east of the Mississippi, go ahead and raise your hand. And that gets us up to about 140 of our participants, maybe a few more. If you're from the US west of the Mississippi, raise your hand. And everybody else, go ahead and raise your hand up. We'll Raise them all at the end. And again, nice thing from a webinar. You don't actually have to hold your hand up. All right, we added a few people west of the Mississippi, but we've still got about 50 of you unaccounted for who haven't raised your hand. So if you, if you are from outside the United States, but north of the equator, raise your hand. And we actually see maybe hands going down here. If you're from outside the United States and south of the equator, raise your hand. Not any more hands going up. So we've still got some people unaccounted for, but definitely have audience members from around the country at the very least, and participants, a lot of you from the Northeast. So I think you're going to love what you hear today and be able to really get some hands on advice for what you might want to do in your backyard. So speaking of backyards, before we go any further, I want to ask you one more question, and that is about your backyard. I'm going to put up another poll here and if you wouldn't mind telling us, not a, you know, a detailed description of your backyard, but kind of what's the ethos of your backyard? Is your backyard or your front yard for that matter, is it a beautiful curated green lawn? Is it a forest? Is it a veggie garden? Is it flower beds everywhere? Of course, it may be some mix of all of those. But just give us a quick sense of where we're starting from today in terms of the ecosystems around our homes. And this is great. We've got so far, about half of you and climbing have voted. And so far the most popular answer actually is into the woods. You've got some woods and some wildlands in or around your home. About 41% there. Let's see, about three quarters of you have voted now. And the second most popular answer is flowers, flowers everywhere. So we've got some flower gardeners. About a third of you say that's what best describes your backyard. Another 12%, brown is beautiful, right? So you've got grass, but maybe not doing all whole lot of watering or fertilizing to support it. Another 8% each say perfect, beautiful green lawn. You could mistake it for a golf course. And about another 8% say tomatoes and lettuce and herbs. Oh my, you are veggie gardeners. So we've got a great diversity of yard types on our Zoom webinar today. And I think that's going to make for some really interesting questions and discussion later in the hour. So thank you all for sharing that with us so that we can get to know you a little bit better. Without further ado, what I would like to do is introduce today's main presenter. We will have a panel discussion a little bit later in the hour, but we're going to start with Woods Hole Research center senior scientist Chris Neal, who is going to tell us about some of his work on our backyard ecosystems. And he's going to do it from his backyard. So, Chris, take it away.

All right, well, thank you. Thank you, Heather. I'm going to share my screen here and put up my starting slide. So I'm a scientist at the Woods Hole Research center, and I'm really interested in how human activities on the surface of the planet affect ecosystems and how they work. And I spend a lot of my time in the tropics thinking about, well, how deforestation in the Amazon impacts water and climate. But I live in suburbia, and I'm interested in sort of what we're doing in our backyards and what we're doing sort of closer to home. And I'm not alone in this. Whoops, Let me go back. I'm not alone in thinking like this. I have a lot of really smart colleagues around the country. And about 10 years ago, we started getting together in formats just like this to think about, well, you know, how what's going on in urban ecosystems and how would we study them? So instead of sort of talking about, well, telling people what to do in their backyards or how you might go about improving the environment, but really, what's the science behind how our backyard choices affect the environment? And we started out talking about this paper which came out in 2005, and it was by Christina Malesi, who worked at NASA. And, you know, we do a lot of this kind of stuff at Woods Hole Research Center. We look at this image like in the lower left of night lights across the US and we think about, well, what can we learn from that? Well, what Malesy learned was that those images were very, very tightly correlated with the amount of lawn that was in an area. And she produced this really interesting map. And this map was really the first national map of lawns. And yet lawns are only a part of what's going on in these sort of urban ecosystems. You look at dense urban areas across the country, they occupy maybe 3% of the land area. But if you look at this sort of spread out suburban urban land use that's going on, we really have created this very novel environment on Earth that covers almost 20% of the entire continent. And that was. So we started focusing in on, well, other people have been studying lawns. There's a little bit, not quite as interesting as the whole milieu of residential land use. So we're having these basically Zoom or Skype meetings. And I sent around this image to everybody and I said, here's a picture of a city, suburban area on the left, a suburban area on the right. And I challenged people say, what city is this? And we were coming from five or six cities across the United States. And in fact, nobody could tell, right? Turns out the left is Boston, the right is Phoenix. The swimming pools are a little bit of a giveaway. But the fact of the matter is the environment that's being created in these residential landscapes, these novel ecosystems are actually quite similar to each other across the country in the way that people spread out and use land. And then so we started having conversations about, well, how would we study that? And we came up with this idea that we could study the fact that people are pushing these very different ecosystems around the entire country. You know, they're taking forest in Boston and Sonoran Desert in Phoenix, and they're creating this, in some ways we think quite similar landscape. And we born of that concept was this project, we had this wonderful name for called the Ecological Homogenization of Urban America. And the gist of it, and our leader was Peter groffman. I am a 1 player among many here. And the gist of it was that urban land use is homogenizing the US by making residential ecosystems out of very different ecosystems. And this is Minneapolis, Louisiana, Phoenix, Boston, Baltimore and Miami. And I always argue that sort of, you know, reward comes to those who were prepared. Because just about this time when we started organizing these people in these six cities at all of these institutions, the National Science foundation released a call for what they called macrosystems Biology and macro. What they meant by macro system was that can we study a continent as a system and try to understand how a continent is working and responding to land use change or other climate or other factors. So we were ready with this project and we were lucky enough to get a project from the National Science foundation. And it launched us on this sort of decade long, I think, very interesting journey of a lot of us sort of becoming urban ecologists, sort of, you know, as part of this project. So what did we do in this project? We did two main things. One is we asked people what they do in their yards, what they care about, how they treat their yards, and sort of what motivates them to do what they do. So we did a phone survey, 1500 people in each of these six cities. And I'll show you that yielded some very interesting results. The other thing is we went out and became field ecologists, sort of in suburban ecosystems. And this was a new experience for me. It wasn't for some of my colleagues, but here I am with a 1 meter deep soil core and we had to call digsafe for every house we went to because you don't want to tap into a gas line or a water line or cut somebody's phone. But we went out and we sampled, heavy duty sampling in people's yards. We measured a whole bunch of stuff and I'm going to show you a few of what I think are the highlights. But we looked at through the survey, we looked at management practices, what people want. We looked at microclimate, we looked at soil carbon and nitrogen cycling, we looked at tree biomass and carbon because those play a key role in, in climate and things like providing shade and microclimate in cities. And then we were, some of us were sort of dragged kicking and streaming into this, looking at biodiversity. And in the end that's proving to be the most interesting thing. So here's, I'm going to show you this. The most complicated graph comes first. And you don't have to understand every one of these graphs, but what I want you to look at is how similar they are. On the left is we ask people, are you very satisfied? That's zero on the left of each one of those. We asked if you were very satisfied with your yard, do you like your yard? And the social scientists thought we were nuts. Like, this is a stupid question, but the natural scientists were intrigued. We thought, this is just like, this is interesting, do people like their yards? And if they do, it's going to be really hard to get them to change. Well, turned out people love their yards. 10 was the most common answer. And it looked identical no matter where you were. You liked your yard if it was 110 in Phoenix and, you know, 34 degrees in horizontal sleet in Boston. Everybody loves their yards. So we are pushing everybody to be similar, right? The other thing we did is we actually looked at what they did and this bottom graph here is just a percentage of the households that fertilize their lawns, basically. And it was very similar. It was more between high 50s and 70%, pretty narrow range. And when you look at the range of the natural nitrogen supply across all those cities, it's enormous. So what we're doing with this idea is that by having similar practices across cities and irrigation was similar in bizarre way, right? You irrigate almost as much in Boston as you do in Phoenix, which strikes me as nuts. But we're pushing everything toward this common sort of homogenized medium in terms of what people do and sort of what you get in terms of the structure of lawns. And then of course, the social scientists. These are a huge amount of fun to work with, social scientists. And so they have all these crazy ideas. And one of them was this idea, they called it the landscape mullet hypothesis. And we measured what people did in front yards and in backyards. And, and we asked them, did they do the same thing in front and back? And the idea was, comes from the mullet haircut, right, that it's short and businesslike in the front, but there's a party in the back. So what people do in the front of their yard depends on what their neighbors think. What they do in the back is like anything goes. And I'm sad to report that the finding from this was that there was no difference. And we have kind of put a nail in the coffin, much to the disappointment of the postdoc who came up with this idea. But we put a nail in the coffin of the landscape mullet hypothesis, at least for the time being. The thing that I thought was really interesting was we asked people, you know, so why do you do what you do? And out of a scale of 3, 3.0 means very important, 0 means not important at all. Didn't even think of it. And we asked people, you know, why, what do you, what do you want out of your yard? They want beauty, they want personal space, they want it to be easy to maintain. And then if you go down the list, they care a little bit about support wildlife. They wanted to have plants native to the area maybe about half the people half the time. And the shocker to me was, do you care if it reduces pollution to local water? No. 0. Do you care if it helps with climate change? No. 0. So people love their yards, but they're just not thinking about yards as a way of, of having any influence at all on these sort of bigger scale questions. So we did a whole bunch of other stuff. And I don't have time to run through all of these findings, but we found a lot of evidence for this homogenization idea. Soils in yards were more similar to each other and have more carbon and nitrogen than the native ecosystems. So if a soil had. A lot of carbon in Boston, you scrape some of it off, it didn't have much in Phoenix, you put some in. And the temperatures and humidities were also much more similar in this suburban milieu than in the native ecosystems. It's kind of not surprising, but again, some hard evidence for exactly how homogeneous this residential landscape has become. So now I want to talk about some of the more bio. Biotic factors we looked at in cities. You know, the carbon storage in urban trees across this urban suburban exurban gradient. And these are the results from Boston. I'm not going to show you results from the rest of the country, but just to say that we compared the urban part of the gradient over on the left, the dense urban, suburban and exurban, against some reference forests that we measured around Boston that Harvard Forest did, that were on Cape Cod. And it's not surprising that there's sort of this gradient of increasing carbon, the less dense the sort of asphalt and impervious surface gets. And while suburban areas and urban areas don't have as much carbon as the native forested areas, they have quite a bit, much more than half and a meaningful amount. I think the more interesting feature was that there was a big difference in the kinds of trees and the size of trees that held that carbon. Here's just a plot of the proportion of trees in the urban area, which is the black hash marks, and in the native areas, which are the green. And what was interesting is the urban areas had a small number, but some very big trees, and the native forests had more, smaller trees. And that 54% of the carbon in the trees in the residential areas was in these big trees. And most of those trees were non native trees. So I think this is interesting because what do we think about global change? We think about more wind, more ice storms, more things that can damage big trees. I think those big trees, while they hold a significant amount of carbon now, are kind of more vulnerable than, than the trees in the native forest in terms of people are worried about them falling on their houses. So the way you treat trees in your yard, please look at it through this lens. Like the big trees that we care for in these urban environments play a disproportionate role in the carbon storage. But we've traded native species for much more non native species. This is just the winner of the native species. Of the non native species in Boston is this tree we call Norway maple. Very fast growing, tolerant of urban pollution. So it's become very predominant in lots of urban areas. One of the areas that I loved was the plants and the place where the Whole homogenization idea breaks down is in the plants. There are hundreds of species of plants in urban yards compared with native areas. These are the native areas on the right. These are the plants that people cultivate on the left, but also the ones that kind of just come in spontaneously. There's this gradient of some plants that people didn't plant, but they just occur. The richness of this suburban flora is just astounding. In 30 yards in the Boston metropolitan area, we found one fifth of the entire flora of the state of Massachusetts. We found 1100 species of plants, and they're way more diverse than the reference areas. We found 150 trees, species of trees and woody plants in urban, in the suburban areas, but there were only 27 of those species in the reference natural areas. So we're introducing this absolutely enormous diversity. And that's where what you do can really make a difference. Here's just a look across all the cities, Baltimore here, Boston, Louisiana, Miami, Minneapolis. And the cultivated species are the blues and the navies. And the spontaneous species, native and non native are the. Are the orange and browns here. And of course, the reference areas over here have way fewer species and mostly spontaneous native and a few spontaneous non native. But you've layered on top of the native system all this complexity. And I'm happy to report that, you know, here in Boston, we found we had the best botanists, we had the most diligent field crews, and we found quite a few more species in our yards than any other city. Course it's wet here and we get a lot of plants, as people know. So we also looked at sort of lawns as well as yards and the lawns. I worked on this part and I thought this was interesting just as a little aside. So we got down on our hands and knees, we studied what's in lawns. And it turned out that I would thought, oh, everybody plants the same grass everywhere. Well, that was absolutely wrong. What was similar across all the lawns was the weeds, the dandelions and the clover that the grass was actually quite different. There's a Miami sod mix, there's a Boston, New England Cape Cod mix, there's a Minneapolis mix and LA mix. So those all were almost as different as the native plants. But we're making the world safe for weeds in lawns. And that was one of the interesting findings. So people do all kinds of crazy stuff in yards. We spent a lot of time in yards and we thought, well, what if instead of studying just what's out there, what if we studied what people intentionally tried to do in their yards. What if we studied people that manage their yards in very, very different ways? And the second round of this project and the round that Desiree Narengo, who's going to be a panelist here, was involved in was this, this second part. So I'm drawing a lot from her results. But what we did was we looked at natural areas again, but we looked at people who sort of had these high input lawns, we kind of nicknamed them chem lawns. People who hired lawn care companies had very neat manicured lawns. People who had low input lawns, who mowed and did some gardening but didn't use a lot of amendments. And then people who intentionally planted their yards for wildlife. And here's where, where David comes on the panel because we use the National Wildlife Federation's certification program. And we looked at yards that people had intentionally tried to make into wildlife friendly yards. And then we had, in some cities, we didn't have them in Boston we had water, water feature yards that is, you know, if you're trying to catch rainwater by the curb and keep it out of the Chesapeake Bay. We didn't end up having enough of those in Boston to worry about. But the results on the plant end were really interesting. Huge difference in the number of plant species in intentionally sort of wildlife friendly yards. And so this is this, it's encouraging, right? Not unexpected, but this went in exactly the direction we thought. These are the sort of the number of species that you find if you measure, you know, five, 10, 15 or 20 different plots or yards. And so very big differences and again, very much more plant diversity in yards compared with, compared with the native reference areas. So we studied birds, we did bird counts in all these yards and I'm going to summarize the bird results. Desiree has looked at them much more than I have. But the bottom line was there were more species of birds and more birds of species that did different things like the insectivores versus the long distance migrants versus the natives. And there were more non native species like this starling in the lower right compared with sort of cat birds, upper left toey and yellow throats. And so yards had more different kinds of birds, but that the kinds of birds were spread across different birds doing different kinds of things, including more non native birds. But we didn't find great differences in amongst the yard types. And the reason really is that birds are responding to the landscape, the surroundings. They responded very tightly to the amount of forest cover up to a point. And so you had More forest cover, you had more birds, sort of regardless of where you were, up to a pretty high level of forest cover. But, but, but, but the birds didn't sort of, if your neighbor was doing a wildlife yard, you, you get the benefit, right, of having birds in your yard. We got some very interesting results with other fauna. We measured ground beetles and we measured bees. So I'm going to sort of talk about those because I think people, especially the bees are something people are interested in. The reference areas, this is just for Boston and Boston, I think had the clearest results for ground beetles. On the left you have reference areas. These are big reference areas and small reference areas. And then you have the intensity lawns, the more passive managed lawns, and then the wildlife lawns. And so there's this gradient of if you push your lawn toward being, and your yard toward being more natural, you get a fauna that more closely resembles the reference areas, at least in the Northeast. And there were some regional differences and they come out, I think most strongly in the bees. We in Boston found the same thing kind of with, although a different direction lawns were, yards were pretty good for bees. And the wildlife lawns were the best. The low and high maintenance lawns and yards didn't get, didn't look too different. But you look at California and Los Angeles, the pattern is completely reversed. So in la, it's the native scrub areas that have the high number of bees. And while wildlife yards look more like the native areas in terms of the bees they harbor, they don't look as different as Boston. So I think the bottom line for the bees is it's. So the story gets a little more complicated the deeper you look. But, but the story for the bees is more lawn gives you fewer pollen specialists, fewer stem nesting things that like all this sort of raggedy dead stuff all over the place, and more habitat generalists. So you end up with quite a few numbers of things like bumblebees and honeybees, but less of the specialists. And in terms of biodiversity conservation, it's often a specialist that we, that we care about. So I want to think about the future for a little bit. So some of the things we've really learned that I think are relevant countrywide are more forest cover is better for a wide variety of biodiversity and ecosystem services. You gain more carbon, you moderate your microclimate more, you have more birds, you have, at least in some regions like ours, more ground nesting fauna, insects, and you have more bees. And so I'm going to end here by saying, well, okay, this is my house. I've taken this to heart. I have tried to get rid of lawn, make more woody cover, increase the plant diversity, which is the thing I'm really into. I'm one of those native plant people and so, you know, I end up with this environment like this. But I think there's more to what we can do. And I think what I'd like this science to ultimately be able to tell us is to come up with some site specific recommendations for different areas of the country in which we can say, all right, here are the habitats you should be trying to recreate on your property. And Tom Chase, who you'll hear from him in a minute. And I have thought a lot about this for the local region and the coast here, because one of the habitats that's most endangered are sort of open, grassy, shrubby habitats. And in a place like this, those are disappearing very fast. They're falling to subdivisions and they're falling just to the regrowth of our forest. But there could exist opportunities to try to recreate some of those more endangered habitats that have the species of greatest regional conservation concern and create situations in yards so that I'm just not blanket, in a blanket way creating more cover, but I'm actually trying to introduce and preserve points of those habitats that are disappearing in the region. And I think that's where I'd like to see some of this go. How can you manage for those specific things that are both in habitats that are shrinking and declining and therefore very important for biodiversity and the species that are associated with those habitats? And I think we don't really have those prescriptions yet. But I think the science, this kind of science that we're doing is the way forward. We have to go in sort of open the hood in each individual, in lots of individual yards, and, and do it in a way that doesn't necessarily mean that so what works in Boston is going to work in la, but I think this network of sites, the whole approach of sort of taking a team view of it and then trying in the end to come up with these specific recommendations for how you manage in the different environments around the country is going to be kind of the lasting legacy of this project. All right, well, Heather, I'm going to turn it over to you and we're get ready to hear from our wonderful panelists. Thank you.

And thank you, Chris. And what I'm going to do now, if you want to stop your screen share, Chris and I have invited each of our panelists to start their video so that we can see everybody's faces as we're chatting. And I'll introduce everybody here. If you would like to see our whole panel at the same time, you can do that by selecting gallery mode up in the top right of your screen. Or if you'd like to be viewing who's speaking at any given time, you can do that as well. Our panelists today, I mentioned that Woods Hole Research center scientists work with global networks of partners and I think this is a great example doing that with the specific goal, as Chris just mentioned in mind, of getting from basic science to science that we can actually put into practice in making decisions in this case at the individual level, in our own yards and perhaps at larger societal levels as well. So joining us on the panel is Desiree Narango. She's a postdoctoral researcher at the Advanced Science Research center at the OF Center, University of New York, also a visiting researcher at UMass Amherst and a couple of other affiliations. Desiree, welcome to the panel. Also Dave Misajewski, who is a naturalist and a spokesperson for the National Wildlife Federation and author of Attracting Birds, Butterflies and Other Backyard Wildlife, which is a great, you know, handbook and toolkit for those looking to do exactly what Chris has been talking about in terms of creating more habitat in your yard. And last but not least, Tom Chase, a 25 year veteran of the Nature Conservancy, leading conservation innovation and strategies there, currently on special assignment, which sounds very spy like to the Permanent endowment for Martha's Vineyard. So welcome to all of you and I would like to kind of kick this off with maybe some clarifications. And we're already seeing questions popping up in the Q and A. If you have questions, do please go ahead and put them there. And we will get to audience questions as well. But Chris, you alluded to the fact that as you get into the science, as often happens, the deeper you get into the science, the more complicated the answers get. And in particular what stood out to me is this kind of contrast that in fact, surprisingly to me, our backyards, when we're trying to make them better habitat, are actually more diverse than natural habitats in terms of plants, but the wildlife diversity doesn't necessarily measure up to match. And Chris and Desiree, I wonder if you guys could dig into that a little bit. Do we understand why that mismatch when we are creating so much new diversity in the plant realm, why don't we necessarily see that reflected in the animals that are using those plants and using that habitat?

DES I'll take that for a start. One of the reasons is, you know, humans are going to the nursery and putting this stuff there. I mean, it can get there in a very direct and immediate way. Whereas, you know, a ground beetle would have to come in from somewhere else. A bird would have to sort of bird has the potential to come in and use an area, and they will. But the directness of the human control over the landscape is really what sort of makes it. And you look at the plots of how many of the species are sort of native species versus how many are cultivated or spontaneous escape from cultivation right close by, it's a very, very sizable amount. So a lot of that diversity is, in some ways it's real, but it's a little bit artificial because it's directly a result of humans.

And Desiree, could you also expand on that a little bit and talk about the importance of native species in particular in how that shapes the outcome of what we see in a particular yard?

Sure. So, like what Chris said, a lot of these plants, plants that we see in people's yards, end up being cultivated non native species. And it turns out that a lot of our native animal species have adapted to use particular plants like butterflies, when they're caterpillars, they use particular plants to feed on. We have bees that will only visit certain flowers in order to collect pollen. And so it's pretty simple. If we don't have those native flowers there for the bees and the butterflies to use, then we're not. We're not going to get them there. And then it also translates into the birds as well, because our birds are relying on insect prey. So if you put out a bird feeder, which is a wonderful way to interact with the bird community, you will get birds, but you may not get all of our most specialist bird species that need the rest of the food web in order to have habitat in your yard.

I want to actually go to an audience question here because this is one that stood out for me as well, similar to this kind of counterintuitive relationships with biodiversity in the yards. Chris, you mentioned that we actually see more carbon and more nitrogen in suburban areas than we do in natural ecosystems. And many of us in the Northeast have learned to have maybe a negative reaction to hearing lots of nitrogen because we immediately think, oh, that's maybe too much and over fertilizing our natural ecosystems nearby. But we hear a lot of carbon and think maybe that's a good thing. So good bad labels may be a little too simplistic, but when you see, oh, there's more carbon in these Suburban lawns. What does that make you think, you know, in terms of maybe the impact for climate change of the way that we're managing our lawns?

Well, two things. One is so the soils have a little bit more carbon, but there's way less carbon in the trees. So the net carbon is lower in yards, mostly because you don't have as many trees. You've cleared some areas. What you do, you know, it's known. When I first started working in the Amazon, I found that pastures had more soil carbon than the original forest did, at least at the surface. And everybody was shocked. But grass puts carbon into the soil, and prairies do that. And that's why they were such good agricultural soils. So it's not really a surprise. The other thing I would say is that the biggest gains in carbon were in the densest urban areas with the most intensive management. So that isn't necessarily what you want to do from a nitrogen point of view. You put more fertilizer, you put more water, you grow more grass, you stock a little bit more carbon into the soil. But of course, there are trade offs, and the nitrogen one is an important one in lots and lots of places like Cape Cod or Minneapolis.

So we're losing your audio a little bit there, Chris. I want to shift gears a little bit as we can dig into this science and start to get ideas about what we might do in our yard. But then there's this translation also, as you were alluding to at the end of your presentation, Chris, this need to translate this into very specific recommendations, specific for types of properties, types of property owners, locations, that sort of thing. Dave, you've co authored this book, and it's kind of a toolkit. How do you actually get people started on creating a yard that is more habitat than the grass that we're perhaps used to thinking about or seeing in our lawns?

That's a great question. And it's what the National Wildlife Federation has been doing with our Garden for wildlife program since 1973. And what, you know, my role as a naturalist really is all about. It's about kind of interpreting all of the science for just, you know, regular folks out there who are interested in, you know, having a beautiful yard and having a functional landscape, but at the same time want to make sure that it's helping to support the birds that they love and the butterflies that they love and increasingly the bees that they love. And I'm particularly thrilled to hear that, you know, that that kind of message that we've been getting out there for all These decades really is backed by the science. And so it's our job and those of us who are kind of interfacing with the public to, you know, got to take all this information and package it in a way that, you know, is just. It's easy for people to really wrap their minds around. And so, you know, for example, everything that we were just talking about, about, you know, the suburban urban landscape might have more plant diversity than a sort of a wild habitat. But, you know, what the science shows us is that not all plants are created equally, at least when it comes to supporting the wildlife, because of this whole idea of co evolution, as Desiree was saying. And so, you know, the science is pretty clear that native plants support more native wildlife. So just, you know, blanket diversity isn't necessarily going to help out the wildlife if it's not the right plants. And so that's something, again, that with our Garden for Wildlife program, we really try to educate people about and, you know, we kind of have simplified all of this down from a wildlife habitat point of view to four things that all wildlife need to survive. Their food, water, cover and resources and places where they can reproduce and raise their young. And by just framing it in those four kind of simple things that people can kind of assess their own yard or garden space and begin asking these questions like, how am I providing these natural food sources? Are the plants that I have the best to do that, you know, how am I providing cover or shelter? And you go down this checklist and it's just, you know, it's very sort of user friendly. And so again, that's, I think that's how we do it and how we continue to get the message out there. Because I'll finish by saying the problems are real. And again, these data kind of show the homogenization of the North American continent as we change the natural ecosystem to this very similar lawn and kind of plant palette coast to coast. And one of the ideas, kind of core to this Garden for Wildlife concept is celebrating the diversity, the natural diversity that's found anywhere. But in the US we have incredible interesting diversity in plant communities and ecosystems that, you know, people can be celebrating in their yard. You know, you don't have to have a yard that looks the same in Arizona as Boston, yet we do. And so again, I'm really happy that this research is happening and that we're all kind of working together to get the message out.

Well, and Tom, you know, I think what Dave was just alluding to there with the fact that we do see this Homogenization with. That's in part societal values, right, that we've collectively decided, no matter where you are in the US that you should have a lawn, and that's the beautiful or the aesthetically pleasing and. Or societally right thing to do. And Chris alluded to the fact that when you ask people the values that are driving their choices, things like wildlife and climate benefits seem to be pretty low on the list. Now, I think that's changing. And we definitely have plenty of people participating in our webinar today for whom that is not the case. And we will get to, you know, specific questions of how do I do the right thing? But more broadly, how do we start to change those values or raise awareness and create incentives for people to do something other than the lawn? That is perhaps the norm.

That's a great question, and thanks for asking. Because when we started a pilot project here on Martha's Vineyard island, off of Massachusetts, where we started about 10 or 12 years ago, it was along very much the same lines that Dave was just talking about. And we were under the impression that we're going to have to, in almost a cooperative extension service kind of model, go to people's individual homes, sit down over the kitchen table, ask them what it is that they liked about their lawn or liked about their yard, and kind of, you know, dive deep. We were expecting answers like, well, we need a place for the grandkids to play soccer, and we need this and that and the other thing. And it just goes to show that, like Chris was saying, you have these expectations when you go into research, or in this case, sort of anecdotal, sociological kind of investigations. What we found is that most of people were just drumming their fingers on the table, and they were saying, look, we're already in. Just tell us what it is you want us to do. Which took us right back to sort of the same place where Dave was, which is sort of the same four things that you kind of want in different places in each ecosystem, but the same kind of formula. Food, water, cover, place to rear your young, that kind of thing. And as we evolved this program into a larger program with Cornell University, we were able to work with sociologists and psychologists to kind of dig a little bit deeper about what engaged people specifically. Beyond that, just tell me what to do. And the things they most wanted were design principles. How do I make my backyard be wild but not look unkempt? How do. Where do I get native plants? What are the simple formulas that I can follow? So we ended up sort of devolving from having to advocate for the concept and more about providing the how to elements. And that seemed to be the most fundamental thing we learned about translating from getting people from the traditional lawn landscape into the kind of wild landscape that Chris was talking about.

Well, along those lines, we certainly have plenty of questions from the audience, and I want to jump to one from Ellen, who says that a landscape designer that she's been working with is working on the theory that different soil types in an area are naturally home to specific species and that merely planting plants that are native to a large area, say the U.S. or the Northeast, is maybe not as effective for supporting wildlife as being very specific to a particular locale. And I'm seeing nodding heads. I mean, Desiree, do you want to jump in there? I mean, how local do we need to get when we're talking about native species in order to actually see the benefits of perhaps ripping out what's in our backyard and replacing it with a native species?

Sure.

So that's a really good question and one that I get a lot. And in some ways, it's almost a personal question, too. When you define something as native, it can be somewhat subjective. Are we talking about native to my county? Are we talking about native to the state of Massachusetts? Are we talking about native to the East? In my research that I did for my PhD, we found benefits of native plants for insects and birds using a broad definition of native to the eastern United States. And that's a lot broader than what a lot of people. But we use that definition because, reasonably, the animals that we were interested in, the birds and the caterpillars, have adapted to the plants of the East Coast. We've done another analysis that have looked at particular plant species across the United States, and we find that the same plants come up again and again as being disproportionately important for wildlife, this being caterpillars and for bees. And these are things like willows, oaks, goldenrod. And it doesn't matter if you are in Massachusetts or if you're in Georgia or if you're in Oregon, these tend to be supporting the most butterflies and moths. The point of this question, though, is that we do have some really fine scale associations between, say, fungus and plants or ground arthropods and the soil types. And that is true. But we also have to think about inclusion. And so what I like to say is that if you are able to get a plant that is native to your specific county or your specific locale, by all means do that. But if we are Going to get more of a buy in for the broader public to get more communities and more people that are engaged and motivated to plant native plants for wildlife. We have to make things easier for them and that's starting with more broader definitions. So we need to get Home Depot to start carrying plants that are native to at least your state and getting rid of those invasive plants that we don't want. And so I like to tell people to try for the state if you can, and if you want to get information about what plants are native to your state, you can go on. The National Wildlife Federation has a native plant finder that's really useful and the USDA also has a plant database. It's called, what is it called? Flora of North America Plants Go in there and find it as well.

Right.

Thanks for that plug, Desiree. I was just about to pipe up and shamelessly promote the native plant finder. I can throw the link up in the chat in a second. But yeah, what this native plant finder does is it takes the work of Dr. Doug Tallamy, who many of you might be familiar with, and we worked with him to expand what was originally done for the Mid Atlantic region, which is identify these kind of top ranked plants in terms of the benefit that they have to specifically to moths and butterflies and of course then the birds that feed on them, which is most backyard species, at least in terms of what they feed their babies. So you could put your zip code in. This isn't just kind of a willy nilly list. Again, this is informed by what the science says and so it's a really great resource. It's still in beta mode. We're looking for pictures. So it might not be as pretty as it could be otherwise or will be eventually, but definitely check that out. You can Google Native Plant finder, but that's a. I know a lot of folks are probably looking for practical things like what can I do today? So you know, check out that. And I, you know also Heather mentioned my book Attracting Birds, Butterflies and Other Backyard Wildlife. How to Book Simple Step by Step. We'll walk you right through the process. And again, just to underscore Desiree's point, we want to make this as easy as possible and one day would be really fantastic if everybody out there were planting the local native ecotypes in their yard. But we're not there yet. But rest assured, the National Wildlife Federation, tnc, Woods Hole, everybody, there's a lot of people out there right now working with the garden industry to start to make those things happen. And it starts with getting the science and these data out there in a bigger way.

We have an interesting question from an audience member about fire and the role that fire might play in ecosystems, particularly here in the Northeast. But more broadly, when we're talking about going toward a more natural ecosystem in our yard, there can be real obstacles. If, say, that natural ecosystem prior to your house being there, was something that was fire dependent. So what role might fire play and how do you address some of those kinds of concerns?

Tom, I love that question. I spent a large part of my. Did Chris put that question in there? I know he did.

No, he did not. It was not a plant.

I spent an early part of my career involved with prescribed fire. But the truth of the matter is, and I think you were hinting at this, Heather, is that prescribed fire is a really valuable tool. And there's places, as Chris was mentioning, the sand plain grasslands, these very dry, salt sprayed soils that require fire to maintain their diversity. But fire is a very efficient tool, but best used in large areas where it can be safely applied. And by safely, I don't mean in terms of danger to surrounding property owners. That's the first thing people think of. But really it's more about how do you get the equipment in there? It's how do you manage the smoke so your neighbors are not suffering it and all that. Fortunately, we are blessed by some work by Dr. Bill Patterson emeritus from UMass, who's been looking a lot over decades at the effects of fire and some compensatory measures that one can take and has found that some things that you can do, such as mowing and raking, which very closely mimic fire, can be applied in your backyard. And as Chris and Desiree were saying, and Dave too, finding the right species that thrive well, especially in these very dry xeric kind of locations, are part of that mix. So there are ways of managing a small area that you can manage with a rake. You don't need to have prescribed fire, although I have to say I do kind of like it.

Another couple of questions have come in with, I think, a general concern. And one person asked about moss, and one person asked about trees, and one person asked about grasslands. But the theme is, is there such a thing as too small? You know, If I create 10 square feet or 100 square feet of grassland on my property or, you know, plant three trees, does that count? And is it worth it.

To just.

Jump in on that? I think the logic that bigger is better, I think applies here. Right. The more, and I think the data showed that as well. You know, the more natural planting areas, the more you're going to support wildlife and have a kind of a better environmental impact. And that is, this is where people can think, oh, is this really going to make a difference if I do this in my yard? And it does when individuals do it, but it has much bigger impact when you do it and your friends do it and your neighbors do it. And again, that's, you know, we're trying to start this movement, honestly, because, you know, if there's a, you know, a few hundred thousand people out there doing this now, we need to get those numbers to a few, you know, millions. Right. So that's where we're going to see the real big benefit to declining songbirds and declining monarch butterflies and declining native bees. There's a lot of bad news out there about the declines of these species, which are in part fueled by this homogenization of the landscape. But we all have the power to make that little action. That old phrase, think globally but act locally. That's what this is all about. It does make a difference if you do it, but help us get the word out there and let your friends and neighbors know, too.

Desiree, I know you wanted to jump in on that as well.

Yeah. Just to echo what David, I agree with all of that, and I just want to emphasize that every little bit helps, especially with insects, because insects respond so quickly to small changes in keeping your leaf litter or in planting native plants. If you plant it, they will come. You will see butterflies. That's what will happen if you put that there. But the same thing is true for other species, too. So I did some research in Washington, D.C. yards where we would have lone oak trees in the middle of downtown Washington, D.C. covered in migratory warblers because they're headed to South America. They don't know where to find the best food, and it may be that they end up in your yard. And so even if these species are. Are migrating through and only there for one or three or four days out of the year, it could arguably be the most important days of that little bird's life. So if you're able to put out some plants in your yard or even, you know, hang. Hang some plants on your. On your porch or just keep a side of your yard set aside for to reduce your raking or reduce your lawn mowing, each one of those seemingly small decisions can have really important implications for the wildlife and the changes. Even if you're on the edge of a forest, the decisions that you're making in Your yard are also going to impact the forest next to you. So it's important to think about from a positive sense that the things you do for biodiversity in your yard are also going to help the habitats that are around you as well and increase that connectivity in the landscape.

We just have a couple minutes left and Chris, I wonder if you could wrap things up for us with just a little bit you mentioned toward the end, kind of forward looking and where this is going. I mean, are you looking forward to the demise of the lawn? And do you think we're realistically headed in that direction? And how much more science do we need to get, get there?

No.

Well, I think people love their lawns and, you know, they have them for a bunch of different reasons. You know, I think what we're advocating for and what we want the science to do is sort of identify those ways you can sort of make changes around the edges, right? You're going to keep some area very manicured. But, you know, messiness is a really good principle when it comes to these yards. More, more variety, more, you know, sort of things like leaf litter and dead stalks that stay there as habitat for more time. You know, just, just relaxing. The, the need for total control, I think is a good principle in these, in these situations. And, you know, the more that science can talk about and inform what things make the biggest difference. I think Desiree's work on sort of tracing native plants and insects and up into birds is just spectacular. It's exactly the kind of stuff that we need. And the networks that are formed that Tom and David have been working on are just a great way of putting the science into action. So I think there's just much more to be done on all aspects of the biodiversity tomorrow. Very interested in sort of trying to figure out on a population level how much is moving into and out of yards. We know very little about that for plants and insects and sort of how it affects the less common things. And if we built more of those kinds of populations, we could, we could have an even bigger effect. And the areas, we wouldn't have to do it over big areas because these are already over some small areas. So I think there's just a. I think the whole approach is very valuable and we've made a ton of progress. But as you say that the more we know, the more questions we have. But the end game is to sort of put information out there that helps people make decisions about how to push things in a more natural, sort of less manicured and more wildlife friendly direction.

I think that's a great note to end on. And with science, the questions do always go on and on. That's the fun of it, of course. But getting to some really great resources and tips for people. There are a number of those in the chat. If you want to go back and watch this again and hear the advice again. The recording of this webinar will be posted on our YouTube channel in the next couple of days. And you can revisit all of this. Thank you to all of our panelists, Chris Neal of Woods Hole Research Center, Desiree Narango of the City University of New York, Dave Misajewski of the National Wildlife Federation, and Tom Chase of the Nature Conservancy and the Permanent Endowment for Martha's Vineyard. And of course, thank you to all of you for showing up today and for considering turning your lawn or your backyard ecosystem into something a little bit better for wildlife and the environment. Enjoy your yard work. I will say I'm jealous, Chris. I was going to show up from my backyard, but neighbor was doing some noisy yard work. So I'm back in my office. But have a good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much. And we hope to see you back here next week for another of the KNEB series of webinars. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.