Category: Climate Action Plan

Meet GRASP Award Winner and #EcoChampion

We concluded our Birds, Bees, & Trees series with Austin Martin, the 2020 Graduate Research Award Sustainability Program (GRASP) award winner and Ph.D. candidate in Geography and Urban Studies. Austin presented his findings on urban honey bees and pollinator forage as he examines how urban development and social control factor into urban pollinator systems.

Austin’s research seeks to better understand how capital flows through the urban built environment and what this means for urban ecosystems, specifically the health of native and non-native bees. His research considers the critical, social aspects of sustainability offering integrated and transformative climate solutions to urban communities and organizations. 

Let’s dive deeper into Austin’s research.

The gateway to larger ecological questions.

In the past decade, honey bees have rightfully garnered much public attention and concern. They sustain our multibillion dollar agricultural industry, which is heavily reliant on monocropping. Industrial scale beekeepers transport their hives across the United States to employ millions of honey bees as pollinators. As featured on the map, these crops include sunflowers, apples, canola, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, melons, and grapefruit, all across the US.

Austin gained the first-hand experience during his time at the University of Michigan. He learned that honey bees are important not only for our food system but for human-nature connection. There are no other species that humans can cultivate and connect within the way that humans can with honeybees because of their colony scale.

Cities as a haven for bees.

Throughout his research, Austin found that honey bees in rural landscapes were not thriving nearly as well as honey bees in urban landscapes. He saw this same counterintuitive pattern  with honey bees in the urban landscape of South Philadelphia rooftop.

The collapse of beehives begins with the poor biodiversity of flowers for bees to pollinate with. Beehives continue to decline through a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops including various toxins, weather conditions, parasites and poor nutrition. 

Bees normally travel up to 3 miles to pollinate, but not in urban landscapes! In urban areas, the landscapes are rich enough with forage that the bees pollinate locally, increasing their lifespan. People plant new and diverse flowers in cities too. This brings new and unique pollination opportunities to bees.

Rethinking urban green spaces.

The data demonstrates a strong connection between wealth and bee richness. Low income areas had both higher bee abundance and higher richness. Low income communities and stewards of these urban green spaces also suffer from public disinvestment and a lack of capital. In neighborhoods and parks such as Cobbs Creek, we see this manifest in more woody vines, greater disarray in parks and sometimes higher occurrences of crime. This calls for a rethinking of how to manage our urban spaces. 

Austin’s research better characterizes this uneven development across urban landscapes. He challenges our traditional notions of urban greening, asking if what is good for urban greening is truly good for urban ecology. 

As a Temple community, we are in constant pursuit of a more ecologically, politically, and socially viable city. Leveraging this critical study of urban pollinators is an important step in centering community control of public spaces. We can strive for a more just and sustainable commons which equitably serves all Philadelphians, our flora, and our fauna. 

Insight from Austin.

“As a beekeeper, I have learned that a good pesticide to use is called Oxalic acid which is relatively benign to the bees and kills the mites in the hive.”

“My favorite bee is the Blue Banded bee native to Australia and of course honey bees with my childhood connection.”

Contact Austin: aumartin@temple.edu

Check out the Philadelphia BeeKeepers guide!

Learn more about the GRASP Award!

The Temple University Graduate Research Award Sustainability Program (GRASP) advances the university’s goal of expanding sustainability research by providing funding to a graduate student research project focused on sustainability.

Meet our Birds, Bees, & Trees #EcoChampion

We welcomed Timothy Swartz, a current PhD student in the Integrative Ecology Lab at Temple University, to discuss the benefits of birds in urban environments. Timothy is an ecologist, conducting research on patterns of biodiversity and their relationship to the distribution and quality of habitat. He is particularly interested in studying the ecology of organisms in human-altered environments like urban landscapes. 

Where it all started.

Swartz started his academic career at Messiah College where he earned a BS in biology and the conservation of amphibian communities in vernal pools. In 2018, he earned a MS in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and worked in the Ecology and Conservation Biology Lab. Now he is a PhD student with Dr. Jocelyn Behm in the Integrative Ecology Lab at Temple University.

Life in the field.

As a  field biologist, Timothy’s recent research investigates the role of birds in providing benefits to urban residents. Without being asked, birds fill our neighborhoods with song, hunt down pesky insects in our vegetable gardens, and gobble up littered food from our sidewalks. Timothy’s goal has been to investigate how people can return the favor by ensuring that our urban green spaces have the trees and other plants birds need to thrive. His findings could help fuel solutions to the growing problems of litter, tree canopy loss, and the widening gap between people and nature in Philly neighborhoods.

Here are some of our favorite facts from Timothy’s research, highlighted in our Stories of Sustainability webinar.

Positive impacts of birds in city landscapes.

With over 100 urban bird species in the city of Philadelphia and beyond, there are countless benefits that humans derive from nature. In Timothy’s research, he found that cities provide novel resources to people and ecosystems, including birds. 

Species provide ecosystem services, which are services that include acoustic enrichment, pest control, seed dispersal, and visual enrichment. Birds provide songs to the spaces that people enjoy, control pests for our gardens and outdoor spaces, scatter seeds to help our urban areas, and add pops of color that are aesthetically pleasing. These factors all make birds vital to urban sustainability. 

Timothy defines urban sustainability as finding the balance between habitat for animals and plants  and the health and wellbeing of people…

“Creating cities where all people and nature can thrive”

Linking birds between habitat and ecosystem services.

By using these traits to link birds to ecosystem services, Timothy found that Philadelphia supports a diverse array of birds. Acoustic enrichment is supported by birds’ song syllables and the pleasure that strong and complex songs bring to humans. Birds with a majority diet of insects provide great pest control for our urban crops. Similarly, birds that eat a lot of fruits play a large role in seed dispersal. Birds with warm tones, like yellow, red, and orange, trigger a psychological response of enjoyment. 

Differences in habitat influence which birds are present and what ecosystem services they provide. Philadelphia itself has a variety of urban green spaces. Varying from big open parks, overgrown and populated trails, and vacant lots. Timothy concluded in his research that the most important factor in these urban green spaces was local tree cover. 

Timothy then led his research asking, how much of the park is covered by trees? 

Areas with higher canopy cover had birds with a higher average syllable count, visual enrichment, pest control, yet a weak pattern for seed dispersal. Landscape tree cover saw even larger effects, especially with song complexity and a much greater increase in pest control and seed dispersal.

Trees, wealth, and ecosystem services go hand-in-hand.

His research found that trees are really important to both green spaces and across the urban landscapes. Not only do they provide cooler areas in cities, but they also provide habitat for organisms that provide ecosystem services like birds. 

Thinking in the context of urban canopy tree cover, areas of low wealth have far fewer trees and less canopy cover. Therefore, communities that suffer from racial injustice and redlining have lost more than what they have. Timothy found that there were higher enrichments, pest control, and seed dispersion, bringing much more positive effects to wealthier neighborhoods.

Learn more about the longstanding systemic inequalities that impact both people and nature in cities with a research paper written by Christopher J Schell in 2020.

To build sustainable cities, we must think about them as integrated social-ecological systems.

Dive deeper into birds and urban ecology!

Timothy’s research.

Timothy’s website.

Join the Temple Audubon Chapter.

Learn more about SEEDS.