Our vacant land research project is underway! Cleveland has over 3,300 acres of vacant land and local citizen groups are looking at ways to re-purpose these former residential and commercial areas of the city. Several vacant lots have been transformed into community gardens. Our research is examining how the insect community changes when vacant lots are converted to urban farms. We are working on this project with a group of OSU and Cleveland State University scientists as part of an NSF-funded Urban Long Term Ecological Research Project Grant, awarded to our collaborator Mike Walton, CSU. Below are some photos from our first trip to the vacant lot and community garden sites.
Students arrive and collect data from a vacant lot site
Our community garden sites are managed by the Cleveland Botanical Gardens
At the end of the day, insect collecting traps were installed at 16 sites across the city. Kojo and Mark are carrying golf cup diggers, which they used to install pitfall cups. These cups are buried at the soil surface to survey for ground dwelling arthropods.
The Agricultural Landscape Ecology (ALE) Lab is located in the Entomology Department at The Ohio State University in Wooster, OH. We study beneficial arthropods. We are interested in how disturbances within the landscape such as agricultural management practices, invasions of exotic species, and land use changes influence beneficial arthropods and the ecosystem services they provide such as pollination and herbivore suppression. In this blog we will post information about our research and outreach activities as well as current happenings in the lab.
At the end of the day, insect collecting traps were installed at 16 sites across the city. Kojo and Mark are carrying golf cup diggers, which they used to install pitfall cups. These cups are buried at the soil surface to survey for ground dwelling arthropods.
THIS IS GREAT. I THINK THE URBAN GARDENS ARE A SUPER IDEA.
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