This summer, Dr. Julia Michaels (UC Davis Ecology PhD) from Reed College collaborated with Miridae Living Labs and Miridae to pilot our Urban Habitat Tracking Project. Miridae, our design-build sister organization specializes in residential yard conversions to create habitat for, and engage people with, native plants and the wildlife they support. Our research focuses on quantifying the impacts of these plantings on ecosystem services and take into account design elements such as garden size, number of plants, structure, and species.

Our current collaborative research includes:

(1) Database of customers in the Sacramento area who have done restoration plantings across a gradient of sizes (whole-yard to small plantings). We also collected data on time since planting, species planted, soil type, urbanization intensity, etc. This database will be the first step in our larger study investigating the effects of restoration size on ecosystem services.

(2) Design a small-scale pilot study and train citizen scientists. We are working with new customers who will be converting their lawn into native plant gardens. We designed a monitoring protocol for the customers to track changes in pollinator communities over the next 5 years after conversion.

The Urban Habitat Tracking Project will serve as a long-term monitoring project designed to address the following questions and research objectives:

• How does the conversion of residential lawns to native plant gardens influence arthropod diversity at multiple scales?

• How long does it take for a native garden do mature and attract beneficial insect or species of conservation interest?

• What ecological and physical correlates of residential gardens influence arthropod diversity? (e.g. distance to river; proximity to natural spaces; shade proportion; irrigation; etc.)

• Where is the overlap in frameworks from ecology, restoration, and landscape architecture? How can we use this region of overlap to best inform and address urban conservation goals? We are currently writing a paper to investigate this very question!