URBAN WILD LAB

An article by H Hoyle, A Jorgensen, JD Hitchmough – People and Nature, 2019

There was a significant positive relationship between perceived naturalness and planting structure. Perceived naturalness was also positively related to the perceived plant and invertebrate biodiversity value, participants’ aesthetic appreciation and the self‐reported restorative effect of the planting. A negative relationship was recorded between perceived naturalness and perceived tidiness and care. Our findings showed that participants perceived ‘naturalness’ as biodiverse, attractive and restorative, but not necessarily tidy. Perceived naturalness was also related to participants’ educational qualifications, gender and nature‐connectedness, with women and more nature‐connected participants perceiving significantly greater levels of naturalness in the planting.

See the full paper.

As people increasingly encroach on animal habitats, more wild creatures are taking refuge in the night.

Led by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Boise State University, the study found that human activity is driving scores of mammals to shift their activity from the day into the dark hours of the night. With many species already pushed to the geographical margins of their local habitats, the animals are attempting to avoid interaction with humans by “separating themselves in time rather than in space,” the study authors write. (Here’s how some wild animals are hacking life in cities.)

Read the full article.

Zoologists from Trinity College Dublin led by Nicola Marples, along with researchers from Halu Oleo University in Sulawesi and with support from research expedition organization Operation Wallacea, had been studying birds in and around Sulawesi for 20 years. The pinwheel-like island is the fourth largest in Indonesia, spanning over 69,000 square miles.

Geologists believe Sulawesi formed when fragments of the Asian and Australian tectonic plates collided, creating a biogeographic crossroads in the form of an island. When British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace visited Indonesia in the 19th Century, he identified two distinct areas of biodiversity: The western half of the archipelago contained species related to those identified in Asia, while the eastern half’s species had Australian origins. He drew a line along the Makassar Strait, between Borneo and Sulawesi, to separate these regions. But…

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In 1807 the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt published a small book entitled Ansichten der Natur (Views of Nature), which resulted from his more than five-year trip through the American continent. What Humboldt desired to reveal to the reader was a synthetic view (“Totalein- druck”), obtained by a detailed analysis of the multiple local phenomenon (including the human dimension) that composed the physiognomy (“Phisiog- nomie”) of each specific segments of our planet. Find more details about the book here and ‘Essay on the Geography of Plants’

The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism.

Paris has very little green space, so residents are planting gardens on pavements and small areas of public land to make the city greener.
See a film by Richard Kenny

Emma Marris has written among others for Nature, Discover and the New York Times. She challenges the notion that nature can only be preserved in its pristine, pre-human state, a too-narrow characterization “that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature.” Humans have changed the landscape they inhabit since prehistory, and climate change means even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity. In her book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in the Post-Wild World, she argues that we need different strategies for saving nature and champions a blurring of the lines between nature and people for a responsible care of our humanized planet.

And see her TED talk ‘Nature is everywhere we just need to learn to see it‘.

As we surround more houses with grass, we deprive ourselves of natural signposts. Read the article by Kate Wagner

Seiter and his studio had also warmed to the area’s unkempt feeling and wanted to keep some of that messiness in the design of the party space. They tore out the asphalt but kept some of the honey locust trees that had sprouted through its cracks. There was inspiration in other spontaneous plants that had inserted themselves into the disturbed site; Future Green planted another 30 honey locusts and saved or replanted a number of other species commonly thought of as weeds, including sumacs, gray birch, quaking aspen, goldenrod, and Queen Anne’s lace. Carter says the place has the backyard atmosphere he and Harkin were hoping for, with the informality and blurry edges that you’d expect behind a house next to the train tracks. “It doesn’t feel too done,” Carter says. “They’ve kind of set it up to let nature do what it would do, and maybe pushed the fast forward button on it a little bit.”

Read the full article extracted from the September 2015 issue of landscape architecture magazine.