From the Humane Gardener: The frogs are calling. Will we listen?

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Suffering from their own global pandemic, frogs have few places to hide from mowers, pesticides and fungal disease. But helping them starts at home, right in your own backyard.

As Italians sang in hope and unity from their balconies last week, a different kind of national anthem played outside my window an ocean away. American toads trilled their hearts out. Clucking wood frogs plucked the bass strings. Spring peepers chirped a staccato soprano….

The eve of spring, normally a joyous occasion, was unfolding in a world very different from the one we lived in last spring, last month and even last week. And yet it wasn’t different at all, at least not for the frogs, whose symphony reminded me that for so many creatures living here among us, life goes on.

Read the rest of Nancy Lawson’s story

And register to watch her webinar Sunday, April 26th

Join the U.S. Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions

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In November 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the formation of the U.S. Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions group and presented the first set of 2030 Champions.

U.S. Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champions are businesses and organizations that have made a public commitment to reduce food loss and waste in their own operations in the United States by 50 percent by the year 2030.

The staggering amount of wasted food in the United States has far-reaching impacts on resource conservation and food security, while costing businesses and consumers money. To help galvanize national efforts to reduce food loss and waste, USDA and EPA announced the United States’ first-ever food loss and waste reduction goal in September 2015, calling for a 50-percent reduction by 2030. Government alone cannot reach this goal. It will require effort and action from the entire food system. The 2030 Champions have heard the Call to Action and are committed to do their part to help the nation reach this critical goal.

EPA, FDA, and USDA co-hosted a Food Loss and Waste event at USDA’s Whitten Building on October 18, 2018, in Washington, DC. The purpose of the event was to celebrate the commitments of the 2030 Champions to reduce food loss and waste in their industrial operations by 2030 and to sponsor a panel to highlight some innovative ways and best practices to educate American consumers on the impacts of food loss and waste, environmentally, socially and economically. The leaders of EPA, USDA, and FDA signed a formal agreement aimed at improving coordination and communication across the federal agencies attempting to better educate Americans on the impacts and importance of reducing food loss and waste.

Learn more about reducing food waste

Gardening for Earth Renewal

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Article by Plant NOVA Natives staff

How does your garden renew the earth? Vegetable gardens, flower gardens, conventional landscaping and even container gardens can all contribute to a connected landscape that supports our local birds and butterflies. By restoring native plants and avoiding chemicals, together we can heal the damaged landscape we have created with our buildings, sterile lawn, and green-but ecologically-useless plants from other continents.

The wildlife of the East Coast evolved in concert with the complex mixture of trees and understory plants that covered most of the land in the past, plus smaller areas of meadows and wetlands. Turtles, birds, frogs and fireflies all suffer when those hundreds of species of plants are replaced by a monoculture of lawn and a few specimen shrubs. And biodiversity all but disappears when those few plants consist of species that were introduced from elsewhere, as is the case with turf grass (which is from Europe), Japanese Barberry, English Ivy, and many other commonly sold plants, some of which have become invasive and taken over our remaining natural areas.

The antidote is clear: plant more plants, and make sure they are native species! The first step is to look at any nearby natural area and figure out how your property might expand its habitat value and reduce the fragmentation that interferes with the movement of animals. Are you near woods? How about adding more trees and shade-loving shrubs and ground cover? After all, they say that shade gardens are the gardens of the future, because it will be too hot to want to spend much time in the sun! Or perhaps your yard receives your neighbor’s runoff which can be turned into an asset by deep-rooted plants that soak up the excess water and recreate a butterfly-filled meadow. Or perhaps you are lucky enough to have a lawn in full sun that could be used for a raised vegetable bed. Those vegetables are unlikely to be native plants, but the bed will absorb runoff much better than lawn, and you can improve your crop yields by adding a nearby sunny flower garden that draws in the pollinators.

It doesn’t matter whether you want to change or to keep the general appearance of your property – if you prefer, you can achieve the same general look by simply substituting native plants for introduced ones. What we should change is our understanding of how our land functions. You need not settle for a yard that is an empty hole in the map that excludes its natural residents. Rather, your home can become part of what Doug Tallamy, in his newly-released Nature’s Best Hope, is calling our future “Homegrown National Park.” If enough of us make some relatively easy changes to our yard practices, we can knit together our properties into a thriving environment where people and nature live in harmony. Now, in this time of trouble, we can renew the Earth. Find out how at www.plantnovanatives.org/gardening-for-earth-renewal.

Sustaining America’s Aquatic Biodiversity: Frog Biodiversity and Conservation

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Virginia Cooperative Extension has just published a refreshed version of this useful 4-page info sheet (Publication 420-527). Good for naturalists, classrooms, and nature centers.

One of the references is to a site that US Geological Survey sponsors on frog calls. Take the quiz–lots of fun.

2019 Year in Review, by Michelle Prysby, Virginia Master Naturalists Program Director

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For the full report, click here.

National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering study on Grand Challenges for Environmental Engineering in the 21st Century

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The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering performed a study on Grand Challenges for Environmental Engineering in the 21st Century, which they published in 2018. It is now available to the general public and is a good, bracing read. The excerpt below is from the introduction. Yup, it’s 125 pages and will take longer than 15 minutes to absorb, but it’s worth the time. You can download the report and slides, too.

“The report identifies five pressing challenges for the 21st century that environmental engineers are uniquely poised to help advance:

1: Sustainably supply food, water, and energy

2: Curb climate change and adapt to its impacts

3: Design a future without pollution and waste

4: Create efficient, healthy, resilient cities

5: Foster informed decisions and actions

These grand challenges stem from a vision of a future world where humans and ecosystems thrive together. Although this is unquestionably an ambitious vision, it is feasible—and imperative—to achieve significant steps toward these challenges in both the near and long term.

The challenges provide focal points for evolving environmental engineering education, research, and practice toward increased contributions and a greater impact. Implementing this new model will require modifications in the educational curriculum and creative approaches to foster interdisciplinary research on complex social and environmental problems. It will also require broader coalitions of scholars and practitioners from different disciplines and backgrounds, as well as true partnerships with communities and stakeholders. Greater collaboration with economists, policy scholars, and businesses and entrepreneurs is needed to understand and manage issues that cut across sectors. Finally, this work must be carried out with a keen awareness of the needs of people who have historically been excluded from environmental decision making, such as those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, members of underrepresented groups, or those otherwise marginalized.”

Inside Out Gardens

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Article by Plant NOVA Natives

Before we turn our thoughts to spring, let us take this opportunity to plan for next year’s long stretch of cold and gray. Does your landscape give you pleasure in the winter, as you sit inside looking out? Or is it only designed for curb appeal, with the plants crammed up against the foundation so that all you see from your window is the lawn and the street? Or perhaps the shrubs that were installed with the house are now overgrown and blocking your view altogether. A little rearranging can give you both curb appeal and a vibrant vista from your breakfast table or living room.

The first thing to consider is that movement brings a landscape to life. That can be provided by wind bending the grasses but most importantly by birds and other critters that are making use of your yard. A bird feeder can help you obtain that experience, but to actually support the wildlife, you need to provide them with the plants they need for shelter and food for both themselves and their babies. With rare exceptions, baby songbirds cannot eat seeds – they require insects, which themselves require the plants with which they evolved. In other words, to support life, your yard needs native plants.

If you take out any overgrown shrubs and plant new ones fifteen or twenty feet away from the window, from the inside the effect can be as if you added on a room to your house. Native shrubs can be arranged into a living backdrop where birds entertain you as they eat and shelter. Winterberry, Chokeberry and Elderberry are examples of shrubs that provide colorful berries to feed the birds. Multi-stemmed Serviceberries, with their lovely white flowers followed by berries that are also edible to humans, provide a place for birds to sit while they eat the seeds from your feeder. Native Heucheras and evergreen native ferns and sedges can fill the lower levels, which are also the perfect place to include some small shade-loving species that might get lost in a flower garden bed. Partridgeberry, for example, lies flat on the ground and has adorable red berries from November to January. Not as tiny but still quite small, the spring ephemerals start to emerge just when you need relief from winter.

Spring ephemerals are shade plants that emerge and quickly flower in late winter and spring and then fade away once the trees leaf out. If you plant them in the woods, you will be mimicking nature, but you may miss the whole show. How often do you walk in your woods in cold or rainy weather? On the other hand, if you also tuck them under your deciduous shrubs out front where you can spot these treasures from your window or as you walk by on the way to your car, you can enjoy them the same way we appreciate snow drops, crocuses and daffodils as they emerge in succession. One of the earliest harbingers of spring is Round-lobed Hepatica, whose cute three-lobed leaves peek out in March to be followed by pale purple flowers. Another plant with intriguing leaves is Bloodroot, which starts to flower by late March, around the time that the pink and white flowers of Virginia Spring Beauty begin their long bloom period, providing an important source of nectar to bees as they first awaken. The blossoms of Virginia Bluebells may occasionally start to appear that early as well. A whole troop of other ephemerals burst forth in April. You can find details about spring ephemerals and other native plants on the Plant NOVA Natives website, as well as information about where to buy them.

Project Drawdown’s 100 solutions to reverse global warming

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What if we took out more greenhouse gases than we put into the atmosphere? This hypothetical scenario, known as drawdown, is our only hope of averting climate disaster, says strategist Chad Frischmann of Project Drawdown.

In a compelling TED Talk about climate change, he shares solutions that exist today: conventional tactics like the use of renewable energy and better land management as well as some lesser-known approaches, like changes to food production, better family planning, and the education of girls.

Listen for ideas about how we can reverse global warming and create a world where regeneration, not destruction, is the rule. His talk was presented at “We the Future,” a special event in partnership with the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation.

For the full list of solutions, click here.

For material on managing refrigerants, click here.

For Katherine Wilkinson’s TED Talk on empowering women and girls an their role in addressing climate change, click here.

Conduct a food waste audit for the benefit of your budget and the planet

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According to End+Stems’ Alison Mountford, it’s hard to measure household food waste at the scale of the individual home. She reports that 40% of all food produced is wasted and that 67% of the we waste at home is edible. In other words, the average family of 4 is throwing out upwards of $2100 worth of food annually. However, few people can say how much they themselves are wasting, why they wasted it, or which foods are most commonly going to waste.

Because it’s easy to overlook what goes in the trash, she recommends a food audit similar to a food journal. For 1 week, you and your family/housemates keep track of all edible items that throw out. Afterwards, you have a starting point to make simple changes to your household norms and routine.

Here’s the plan and the advice in full, including a free worksheet and access to a Canva template so that you can see what you’re finding.

Ends+Stems is laying the groundwork to conduct the first study to measure how much less food you waste when you plan meals and shop from a tailored grocery list.  

Consider writing to Ends+Stems at [email protected] with the subject line “Food Waste Audit” to be part of an inaugural study to truly change how we act for the planet.

What we can be Optimistic about in 2020

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Article by Matt Bright, Conservation Manager for Earth Sangha, [email protected]

As the Earth Sangha’s resident optimist, it can sometimes be difficult to keep my usual cheery disposition. A new study came out in France (Wintermantel et al. 2019) showing that even after an EU-wide moratorium in 2013 and an outright ban in 2018, agricultural fields still have levels of neonicotinoids that can be fatal to bees. Research continues to pile up showing declines in birds and insects in North America and beyond. UN reports on climate change sound more dire. Amidst all this depressing news, I was contacted by the Piedmont Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society and they asked me if I could give a talk, but that they wanted it to be optimistic – to focus on what is possible rather than what is broken.
I haven’t yet decided what exactly I will talk about during my January 26th talk, but the challenge and the recent holidays have forced me to reflect broadly on what we’re all doing right, and how we can all collectively keep making progress. This isn’t meant to be Pollyannaish. There is much to be distraught about it. But, with hard work there are issues we can address and begin to create some real change. Here’s what I came up with:

Our understanding of native plants role in ecosystems continues to increase. Scientific literacy about plant ecology is the best tool we have for engaging more people and making the case for conservation and restoration work here and abroad. Thanks to the efforts of scientists like Doug Tallamy, Karin Burghardt, Desiree Narango, and countless others, we now have a much clearer understanding about the interaction between native plant communities and the wildlife they support, and the damage invasive species can do to our natural areas. In summary, native plants support a wider variety and quantity of insect life; these insects support a greater variety of bird life; the flowers attract more insect pollinators and nourish these better than non-natives; and the fruits tend to be better suited to supporting native wildlife too. The more we can put native plants back into areas where they belong, the better off we will all be.

Thanks to the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Natural Communities of Virginia, we now have an excellent data set detailing how native plants assemble themselves in the wild. We know that native plants do not occur willy-nilly at random, but in predictable plant communities, and we can use the information, along with historical data and reference sites, to guide restoration.

We now have data on how cultivars of native species function ecologically compared to wild type stock. Annie White’s data show that most cultivars see significantly lower visitation than wild type flowers, and new research on cultivar by Andrea Kramer in Ecological Restoration found that “nearly 25% of cultivars had floral or leaf traits that differed from wild plants in ways that may compromise their ability to support pollinators and other wildlife” and that “only 3% of cultivars received high suitability scores for use in large, undisturbed sites near remnant populations [of native plants].”

All of this research helps us to be more prepared to address future conservation and restoration challenges and informs our work. Even if the conclusions they come to aren’t emotionally gratifying to hear, they point a path forward. In this case, the conclusion is clear: careful restoration of degraded areas with local ecotype stock, replanted into reasonable facsimiles of natural or successional plant communities is a low-risk, high-reward method to improve ecological function. Which brings me to my next point.

We know that we can make a difference. A study looking at fragmentary habitat (Damschen et al., 2019) found that species diversity increased 14% over 18 years in corridors where restoration reconnected disparate parcels compared to ones that remained isolated. This sort of patchwork of parks, natural areas, and undeveloped land separated by swaths of built up areas is mirrored in our own region. By working to improve the ecological value of lands on both public and private areas we can begin the work of reconnecting these fragments into larger corridors.
This work is already happening thanks to homeowners and landscape designers using native plants. Including native plants into landscape designs for larger developments, green roofs, and roadsides will be part of the solution. Advocating and educating people about the advantages of using native plants and how to begin with them is happening right now thanks to Plant NoVA Natives, Audubon at Home and other groups. And of course, our own Wild Plant Nursery supplies homeowners as well as landscape designers, and restoration projects with local ecotype native plants grown without pesticides.

It looks like we will have set yet another record for distributing more plants from our nursery with a whopping 49,734 plants distributed. These plants are hopefully by now all in the ground and will be contributing towards reconnecting some of these fragmented areas and creating better habitat.

We are working with a community of thoughtful engaged professionals and volunteers. This year, our plants reached 29 schools and over 40 parks across Northern Virginia. Inspired by how well our efforts to restore rare plant species (Pycnanthemum torreyi and Solidago rigida) to wild areas with Fairfax County Park Authority went this year, we’re already looking other sites where we will conduct volunteer restoration plantings using our own plants, in areas where larger scale restoration seeding has already taken place. We think this can be a good model that allows land managers to tackle large areas economically with seed sowing, while protecting local genetics and adding appropriate diversity to sites through replanting with local ecotype stock. Keep an eye out this spring when we’ll need a hand with planting!

Across the region, thoughtful restoration work is taking place. City of Alexandria targeted a steep mowed slope in Montgomery Park where we replanted dry meadow species. This planting not only helped to establish a diverse meadow where there was only lawn before, but removed a difficult and potentially dangerous bit of mowing along a steep slope. Fairfax County, Falls Church City and Arlington County have also completed a number of restoration events this year, in part with our stock.

And, of course, many volunteers work tirelessly to see these projects through, to advocate for better policies, educate and engage people who would otherwise not be aware of local environmental issues, and help to inform our own understanding of natural areas by volunteering their expertise with citizen science projects or leading their own restoration projects.

We would’ve never been in the position we’re in today, to support so much great work, if it wasn’t for all the support of our colleagues, our donors, and our volunteers.

And for all that, I am very grateful.