Diverse gardening strategies to conserve pollinators in urban landscapes

Several studies have shown that urban and suburban gardens can support an abundance and diversity of bees and butterflies.  This talk will review the data on beneficial insects in home gardens, in the context of practical home gardening practices that have the most promise for supporting healthy pollinator populations.  In particular, flowering plant abundance repeatedly emerges as a factor that predicts bee richness.  We also examine the impact of plants that are recommended to gardeners as ‘bee plants’, as well as the impact of landscape-level greenspace and greyspace.  Finally, we will discuss the potential cumulative impact of several small garden fragments, dispersed throughout the ‘urban matrix’, on butterflies and bees.