Habitats & Harvests: Networks for Life with Doug Tallamy

Join the Portsmouth Public Library online this spring and summer for Habitats & Harvests, a series on gardening and native plants. Each presentation will be followed by Q&A! We continue the series with Doug Tallamy.

NETWORKS FOR LIFE: YOUR ROLE IN STITCHING THE NATURAL WORLD TOGETHER

Biodiversity is essential to sustaining human societies because it is other living things that run our ecosystems. Yet, throughout the U.S., we have fragmented the habitats that support biodiversity by the way we have landscaped our cities, suburbs, and farmland. This is a problem because isolated habitats cannot support populations large enough to survive normal environmental stresses. We can reconnect viable habitats by expanding existing greenways, building riparian corridors, and by changing the landscaping paradigm that dominates our yards and corporate landscapes. Replacing half the area that is now in barren lawn with plants that are best at supporting food webs would create over 20 million acres of connectivity and go a long way toward sustaining biodiversity in the future. How we landscape today will determine what life looks like tomorrow.

Registration is required. Register to receive a Zoom link!

Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored eighty research articles and has taught Insect Taxonomy, Behavioral Ecology, Humans and Nature, and other courses for thirty-two years. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determine the diversity of animal communities.

His book Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens was published by Timber Press in 2007 and was awarded the 2008 silver medal by the Garden Writer’s Association.