Here’s a paper that goes into the many definitions of green infrastructure across different disciplines, along with related concepts. I’ve certainly seen narrow definitions used in my own discipline of water resources engineering. Defining clearly what you mean by a term and sticking to that definition is actually a good thing, because it takes the power out of the words in the definition itself, and you are now defining the actual structure and/or function of something, and you can now have a conversation with someone else once they understand the definition you are using. Using words without a clear definition, or not being aware of alternate definitions or broader perspectives that are out there, is a problem, and unfortunately not an uncommon one.
Tag Archives: urban ecology
2020 garden retrospective – now with more bug pictures!
Gardening and being around my small urban garden definitely brought me some comfort during the long Covid-impacted spring, summer, and fall. A silver lining of being forced to work from home was being able to work outside some. Anyway, below I’ll just tell my story in pictures.
Black Swallowtails are not rare but they are just fun to watch, and their big fat green caterpillars are fun for the young and young at heart. In addition to bicycle tires, they like the fennel and celery in the garden, neither of which I had to plant this year. The fennel is a hardy perennial with a deep taproot that also spreads aggressively by seed. In fact, I had to start pulling fennel aggressively this year except for a couple spots where I decided it was allowed. The celery (which I mistook for flat-leafed parsley at the farmer’s market years ago) seems to be self-seeding and coming back each spring. There was no parsley in evidence in the garden this year.
We saw quite a few monarchs around. This one is on butterfly milkweed, which really started to take over parts of the garden this year. The monarch didn’t cooperate and spread its wings for a nice photo. This should be a host plant, but sadly we did not see any Monarch caterpillars in evidence. I feel good doing my small part in a small urban garden for this endangered species. We made a brief trip to Cape May, New Jersey in October during the fall bird and butterfly migration, and this is just an amazing thing to see – Monarchs just flitting by every few minutes, adding up to millions I would imagine over time!
Some other plants you can see here are purple hyssop (slightly past its prime) and the fennel just starting to bloom. In the background is the neighbor’s ornamental grass, which is interesting but getting completely out of hand. If I didn’t constantly hack at it my garden would be gone in a few years.
Here’s another (slightly more photogenic) Monarch on a sunchoke flower. The sunchoke, which I planted last year, started to get aggressive this year. I don’t really mind because they are shallow-rooted and easy to pull where I don’t want them. I did notice some squirrels digging them up in the fall and “squirreling them away” in neighbors’ gardens, lol. The sunchokes and hyssop in particular attracted lots of bumblebees which were fun to watch but did not cooperate for photos. Mountain mint was another plant that seemed to attract lots of bumblebees.
We had a bumper crop of milkweed bugs this year. They’re harmless and I think they are super cool, but I can appreciate they might be creepy to people who just don’t like bugs. This is what the butterfly milkweed looks like after it is done flowering and starts to grow seedpods. There was also a lot of common milkweed in the garden which I didn’t plant but leave alone whenever I see it. I notice that friendly neighbors and their gardeners tend to pull theirs, which I will not judge (in case any of you are reading this) but all the more reason for me to do my small part to support native plants and ecosystems.
Completing the butterfly milkweed life cycle, here the seed pods are bursting open and preparing to scatter their goodness to next year’s garden. The milkweed bugs are still around, but I noticed after about this point they just started to crawl away and scatter. I don’t know exactly where they go. The white flowers you can see here are garlic chives, which are super cool and attract lots of bees and harmless little wasps. They (the garlic chives, not the pollinators) are getting just a bit aggressive though.
This giant pumpkin vine just volunteered, probably as a result of throwing last year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost. Either that or the squirrel’s who shredded other peoples’ Halloween pumpkins (we have learned not to put ours out too early) might have buried the seeds. It didn’t grow any pumpkins though, maybe missing some key nutrient?
The spotted lanternflies invaded Southeast Pennsylvania with a vengeance this year. This is an invasive species from Asia that is almost certainly here for good now. They didn’t do any obvious damage to my trees (including this Asian persimmon) but we will see what the future holds. They don’t bite, unlike the mosquitoes we had in abundance. We mostly worried about one particular species of virus this year, but others like west Nile, Lyme disease, and Zika are still around, and with climate change I will not be surprised if tropical diseases like Dengue are on the way. Can we apply the new vaccine development technologies to work on some of these, please?
We had lots of stuff in pots. From left to right here, Thai “holy” basil, Asian long beans, Thai “sweet” basil, sunflowers (“Autumn beauty”, which lived up to their name and I recommend, Thai jasmine. Lots of bell peppers also volunteered this year, but no hot peppers – in past years lots Thai red peppers have been in evidence.
Maypop was my “try again” species this year. With the last few winters being so mild, I am hoping to see it again this spring. The new species I decided to add this year was a low, evergreen groundcover called bearberry. I didn’t take good pictures of it, and anyway it is not photogenic at this point, but I have high hopes for its future.
And finally, the dwarf Asian persimmon turned a nice shade of orange to wrap up the year. It is 3 or 4 years old, and flowered but did not set any fruit this year. My other tree is a dwarf Asian pear. It had some kind of leaf spot and looked a bit sickly much of the year, but it did set a fair amount of fruit, of which the score was humans 2, squirrels the rest. They were good, and that is an all time high score for the humans!
bumble bee watch
If you have some free time or are looking for an outdoor project with kids, you can take pictures of bumble bees and upload them to this website. Scientists there can help you identify them and tell you if they are rare.
Bumble bees seem to like my anise hyssop, milkweed, and sunflowers especially. I tried to take a photo of one just now but it turns out they don’t always sit still for photos. There is only so much you can do for wildlife in an urban situation, but one thing you can do is plant to help bees and butterflies, then have friendly conversations with family, friends and neighbors when they ask what the heck you are doing in your “overgrown” garden and when your “weeds” make attempts to expand beyond your borders.
June 2020 in Review
In current events, the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. is spinning out of control as I write this in early July. I made a list of trackers and simulation tools that I have looked at. Asian countries, even developing countries, pretty much have it under control, Europe is getting it under control, and the U.S. and a few other countries are melting down. Some voices are very pessimistic on the U.S. economy’s chances to come back. So of course I’m thinking about that, but I don’t have all that many novel or brilliant ideas on it so I’m choosing to write about other things below.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
- Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
- Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost
Technosols
A technosol is an artificially created planting/structural medium from manmade materials, such as construction debris and compost. This article from Ecological Engineering journal says a mix of 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost might work. If we truly want green cities, and we don’t want to reduce natural habitats to wastelands by harvesting materials from them to green our cities, this could be a good approach.
May 2020 in Review
You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!
Most hopeful story:
- E.O. Wilson is alive and kicking somewhere in Massachusetts. He says if we want to save our fellow species and ourselves, we should just let half the Earth revert to a natural state. Somewhat related to this, and not implying my intellect or accomplishments are on par with E.O. Wilson, I have been giving some thought to “supporting” ecosystem services in cities. When I need a break from intellectual anything, I have been gardening in Pennsylvania with native plants.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
- There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.
native plant and pollinator gardening in Pennsylvania
This post has a ton of information on gardening with native plants and gardening for pollinators in Pennsylvania – sources of plants and seeds, recommended species and combinations of species for various conditions, and links to a variety of government and non-profit organizations that can provide even more information.
“supporting” ecosystem services in cities
This long article makes a distinction between services provided by natural and semi-natural areas in cities, and a concept of a city as a whole as an ecosystem that provides services. What it reminded me of, though, is the distinction between the UN’s definition of “regulating” ecosystem services and “supporting” ecosystem services.
• Regulating ecosystem services, such as control of stormwater discharge, mitigation of heat in urban areas, mitigation of noise, etc.
• Supporting ecosystem services, such as provision of habitats for urban biodiversity, provision of pollinators for urban farms, etc.
Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning
In the engineering world I inhabit, we have the regulating services reasonably well figured out. We don’t always do a great job of implementing and enforcing, and we exempt too many projects, but basically we have cost-effective standards and best practices for things like flood management and water pollution reduction.
The supporting ecosystem services are mostly not even on our radar. And that means that when we are designing for flood or water quality objectives, our designs are not as green as they might be if we took biodiversity and habitat into account. It might not even cost more to do that, but it would require a more expansive way of thinking. To do that, we would need to communicate effectively to the decision makers and then the rank and file just why they should care.
bye bye bumblebees
The latest charismatic species to be at risk of disappearing – bumblebees, according to Science. It’s a simple story – they just can’t handle the heat.
Climate change could increase species’ extinction risk as temperatures and precipitation begin to exceed species’ historically observed tolerances. Using long-term data for 66 bumble bee species across North America and Europe, we tested whether this mechanism altered likelihoods of bumble bee species’ extinction or colonization. Increasing frequency of hotter temperatures predicts species’ local extinction risk, chances of colonizing a new area, and changing species richness. Effects are independent of changing land uses. The method developed in this study permits spatially explicit predictions of climate change–related population extinction-colonization dynamics within species that explains observed patterns of geographical range loss and expansion across continents. Increasing frequencies of temperatures that exceed historically observed tolerances help explain widespread bumble bee species decline. This mechanism may also contribute to biodiversity loss more generally.
Science
December 2019 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- Pilots occasionally go crazy and crash planes on purpose.
Most hopeful story:
- Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: