Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at research on how we manage our yards and how those decisions impact the ecosystems around us. Certainly when we mow or fertilize or add ornamental species to our lawns we are altering the space, but there are other ways that we interact with our yards and […]
Author Archive
A wild-managed yard of one’s own
Where the grass is greener
Some of the more recent research into lawn science has focused on the people-yard relationship and how different management practices influence the lawns we see. Starting with the first of those, why do we put so much effort into lawns? Some researchers have suggested that our yards are a statement about how we want to […]
Monocultures in miniature?
In my last post I mentioned that I was pretty impressed with the amount of land currently devoted to our lawns- after looking through some research into lawn management and diversity starting in the late 1960s, I realized that this area had almost doubled in about 35 years. In 1969 almost 68,000 square kilometers of […]
A nation of farmers?
Last week I came across a reference to the sheer number of acres currently used by our lawns and was pretty impressed at the full extent of the area we water, trim, and curate (around 128,000 square kilometers, which means it uses several times the space used by farmers to grow corn, according to Cristina […]
If you give a mouse a conservation program…
As you might expect after looking through my blog posts from this month, I found a pretty distinct dichotomy in terms of conservation programs that deal with rodents: some projects are trying to get rid of them, and others are trying to protect them. Either way, there are a variety of options for us in […]
There goes the neighborhood?
When I started looking into rodent conservation, what I had expected to find was a tail of two species groups: 1) invasive, introduced rodent species dominating the natives, and 2) disappearing native species and simplified ecosystems as a result of habitat loss to human activities. It would appear, however, that the global situation is a […]
Many endangered mice, see how their ranges contract
As I mentioned in my first post of the month, I’m interested in learning about the conservation status of rodent species. I think I may have overlooked the threats facing them because several species (notably the black and Norwegian rats) have been incredibly successful invasive species. When I started looking through the literature, I found […]
You dirty rat?
I’ve spent a good chunk of time over the past 2 months putting out small mammal traps to catch rodents at different field sites in coastal Louisiana. My goal is to understand the prey base of local carnivores and then figure out if they are being selective about what they eat or simply taking prey […]
Giving crabs a leg up
In my reading about hermit crabs over the last few weeks, I’ve certainly gotten the sense that most hermit crab species aren’t in particularly precarious positions with regard to survival. While king crabs and coconut crabs are an exception, most species seem to be doing pretty well at the moment. That trend is likely to […]
Catching their breath
As I mentioned in my last post, ocean acidification is likely to cause problems for hermit crabs both because the calcium carbonate used by snails to construct shells which are, in turn, used by hermits will be less available and because hermits exhibit less movement and environmental awareness as pH drops. A variety of aquatic […]