When | 11 December 2024 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Where | Online Webinar
Cost | $10 EIANZ members, $20 non-members (AUD)

The importance of urban greenspaces for pollinators

Greenspaces within urban areas are attracting widespread interest due to the key role the play in providing food and habitat resources for a diverse array of microbes, fungi, plants and animals, with many studies indicating how greenspace ground and vegetation structure and composition contribute to sustain insect pollinators. A swelling number of urban greening actions are being carried out across the world, with many exclusively or primarily focused on pollinators and conceptualised to promote the long-term survival of well-established resident pollinators, boost species that have become rare, and bring back locally extinct species.

This increase in actions for pollinators has been paralleled by a concomitant surge in the development of a diverse array of best-practise ‘greening for pollinators’ resources, designed to support build-environment practitioners and professionals – from local community champions, school educators, and friends-of-groups volunteers to landscape architects, urban developers, and city planners – seeking to or task with implementing greening actions to support pollinators.

Co-designed research: evidence of success

While interest in planning and executing best-practice actions for pollinators is high, very few projects have sought to design and conduct parallel research to assess the ecological changes brought about the greening actions and therefore have not been able to provide scientific evidence that specific objectives have been met. Even fewer have been explicitly co-designed between practitioners and researchers.

In this talk, Dr Luis Mata will present evidence of the success of a co-designed practice-research greening action in bringing indigenous bees and butterflies back into an urban greenspace. This co-designed practice/research study provides much needed evidence and encouragement that greening actions in urban sites can succeed in driving ecological communities towards robust and resilient states, ultimately protecting and increasing the benefits that nature contributes to people and other species.

Dr Luis Mata is an ecologist and entomologist with an interest in complex systems, urban environments, citizen science and science communication. He is a researcher in the Urban Green Spaces Research Group at the University of Melbourne and an alum of the Santa Fe Institute. A substantial component of his work has been conducted in projects that he has co-designed with a wide array of industry, academic, government, and community partners, with a particular emphasis in quantifying insect ecological patterns and providing evidence of the benefits of invertebrates.

This event will run off Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) and will run for 1 hour. The webinar will be recorded therefore attendees and a link to the webinar will be sent to all registered attendees in the days after the webinar.

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