Architecture & Urban Planning

Yards with plants that mimic native vegetation offer birds "mini-refuges" and help to offset losses of biodiversity in cities, according to results of a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE. "Native" yards support birds better than those with traditional grass lawns and non-native plantings.

It all started more than five years ago, when Tershy and his wife, Erika Zavaleta, were living in a different house on the Bethany Curve Greenbelt on the Westside. They knew they wanted to remodel their home, but they kept running into the same roadblock. “What we really wanted to do was turn our house, which was facing the street, around 180 degrees so it faced the park, but it seemed impossible,” explains Tershy. Luckily fate stepped in, and another lot on the park went up for sale.

Few weeks ago, Jessica Hall, a Los Angeles landscape architect who also co-authors the excellent L.A. Creek Freak blog, showed me around some of the little-known wetlands of the old Dominguez Slough, hidden in the South Bay cities of Torrance, Gardena, and Carson.

Editor's Note: The Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation helped fund Sarah's early work on Conservation Development with the Wildlife Conservation Society through a Leadership Grant.

Bike paths, bike lanes, bike racks, and cycle tracks. Bike this and bike that. Cities and towns across Greater Boston are peddling cycling construction projects this summer like never before: If it isn’t a Newton city committee proposing 30 new miles of bike lanes, it’s Malden and Everett converting downtown railroad beds into a multiuse path, or Charlestown and Jamaica Plain residents lobbying for bike improvements once antiquated highway overpasses are torn down. Read the full story

This research will explore the motivations for and outcomes associated with the stewardship of sustainable yard practices and design, with "sustainable yards" being those that more closely mimic natural processes and vegetation composition and configuration. The research will be guided by a conceptual framework that focuses on the poorly understood linkages between the motivation for urban stewardship of sustainable yards, and the ecological outcomes from yard management.

Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green” in many fields. Individual stories poured out and we assembled a suggestive but hardly conclusive collective story. We had the privilege of dipping in and were the beneficiaries of the generosity of an amazing community of creative people—but it’s clear that there is much more to discuss on the topic.

While shrubs may shield bad behavior, mature, well-tended trees do just the opposite, said J. Morgan Grove, a social ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and one of the study's three authors. That could be important for a city like Baltimore, where trees cover just 27 percent of its landscape and some neighborhoods are practically barren. Read the full story