We have been working with many developers, landscapers,
landscape architects on how we can design and manage
communities to conserve biodiversity.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, everybody.
I'm Candace Schaible with Utah State University extension
and the Center for Water Efficient Landscaping.
And you are watching our "Water Well with CWEL" webinar series.
Hello, everyone, virtually.
I'm here on my back porch near the University of Florida
in Gainesville, Florida.
And I was telling Candace, I've been working quite a bit here,
kind of working at home.
And I've been friends with a pileated woodpecker.
So if you hear a big call during our presentation,
don't be alarmed.
That's my buddy out there.
To give you more background about myself and our program,
we formed sort of a consulting team in the University
of Florida called a Program for Resource Efficient Communities.
And we have been working with many developers, landscapers,
landscape architects on how we can design and manage
communities to conserve biodiversity and water
and energy, et cetera.
So we've been doing this for about 20 years now.
And as a wildlife biologist, I actually
work with birds and insects.
I've always come across landscaping parameters,
in terms of landscape architects saying, well,
we can only go so far.
We have to pay attention to cultural and societal values
about what's an appropriate landscape.
And so diving into the literature a while back,
I started to ask him, how can we convince or at least educate
homeowners to shift to more eco-friendly landscapes?
In doing that, I came across a body of literature called Cues
to Care.
And after reading about it and talking
about for the last 5 to 10 years,
I wrote a perspective essay in urban ecosystems.
And this is a review of that literature and what it means
and how it's been measured and how
we will go forward to create more eco-friendly landscapes.
OK, so, Candace can you break in?
You can see my screen OK?
Yeah.
That looks great.
OK, so when we're talking about eco-friendly landscapes,
I'm going to break it up into three sections-- one
to just kind of give a brief of overview
about yards, homeowner decisions and impacts, then talk
a little bit about the Cues to Care theory
and has it been measured correctly,
and then discussion for a way forward.
And then we're going to have time for questions.
I estimate this is about a 20-minute presentation.
So here's kind of a cartoon character.
If you think about homeowners, this is in Arizona.
And the person on the left has decided to turf grass
with a lot of water and irrigation,
versus the person on the right has done
more saguaros and xeriscaping.
So you can think about those decisions
are made by societal norms, made by individual values,
et cetera.
But you can imagine if cumulatively
across the whole neighborhood, everyone
did what the person on the right did,
the little greeny with the green shirt,
you could have quite an impact on water, on energy,
on biodiversity.
But before they even make those decisions,
there are some constraints.
And this comes from a book that I wrote about five or six years
ago, A Primer for Conserving Biodiversity in Subdivision
Development.
And the idea is that the developer has
set the norm for the community.
They've decided how big the roads are,
how much turf grass to use, or how much
exotics versus natives.
And so when people move into the community,
even if they want to change their yard,
there is this subjective norm that's going to constrain.
So we have to think about those different levels.
That book goes in much more detail.
I'm not going to spend any more time on that,
but just to let you know that even if a homeowner wants
to change, there are some constraints--
even on up to the city or county level when
you talk about regulations.
So what we're talking about is how do we
shift from conventional yards?
Conventional yards are typically dominated
by turf grass, lots of irrigation and fertilization,
a lot of exotic plants, not much vertical height structure.
As an ecologist, we're talking when
you look across the landscape at the amount of vegetation
from the ground up to the canopy.
And there's a lot of the use of sterile fill
dirt, which has issues with keeping landscaping going
over time.
More alternative natural yards tend to have very little turf
grass--
very little, if not no, irrigation fertilization.
They're dominated by native plants.
They have a vertical height structure.
And they usually retain some of the original soil structure.
So how can we shift that--
if you think about continuum, you can probably place yourself
somewhere into the full-bore wild
versus the full conventional.
Most people are somewhere in between there.
But how can we shift that median more towards natural?
And why is that important?
As an urban ecologists, birds are--
urban landscapes, neighborhoods, even small forest parks
are used by over 240 birds in North America.
And Candace, if you can, put that weblink into the chat.
This is the URL.
It's a planning tool.
So it's the first time the empirical research has
been synthesized so that landscapers, planners can
manipulate their landscaping plans across the neighborhood
to see how it impacts different species.
And that tool's been out for a while.
And if you're interested in using it, just go to that URL.
It's free.
And you can enter a design, let's say,
for a section of a city or for a neighborhood.
And you can see how it impacts bird habitat.
But people are a little resistant.
I mean, just letting what I call lazy lawnmower
approach-- letting the herbs come up
and flour can get some comments from your neighbors.
So how do we create more of a norm of tolerance
for more ecological-friendly yards?
So how do we overcome this conventional inertia?
Well the instep-- years ago--
it was coined by Professor Joan Nassauer.
She's up at the University of Minnesota right now.
And what she thought-- if we're going
to shift conventional to more natural landscape,
we have to pay attention to cues in the landscape that
show it's being cared for.
So in a nutshell, how far will homeowners
go to adopt more natural landscapes?
Well, they have to answer the question,
does it look like they're taking care of it?
And when you ask about are they taking care of it?
I mean, how many cues are needed, and what types of cues?
So what is acceptable?
So for example, you can have a trimmed hedge, a bird feeder,
a 20% mowed lawn.
Is that they expected ingredients?
What makes a yard aesthetically attractive,
and at the same time, ecologically functional--
at least more functional than it was before?
And there are all kinds of yards.
These are yards in Gainesville--
some of them more natural, some of them more conventional.
You can imagine that range of yards
all across where you live too.
And in some places, maybe the more natural wild landscape
is accepted, in other places they're not.
So with this theory, Joan Nassauer and her students
and her colleagues, they've been studying homeowners
from different cities.
So they surveyed homeowners from different cities.
They showed yards with varying degrees
of vegetation structure, from mainly mowed to more wild.
And then they asked participants when
they thought the yard was messy or too messy?
And that kind of gave an indication
how much cues are needed in the landscape.
Now, when I was looking through the studies, I realized--
and there's the citation there if you're interested,
"Cues to Care: Future Direction for Ecological Landscapes."
It's in Urban Ecosystems right now--
that they were flawed on a number of levels.
One is that a lot of the surveys were not a random sample.
So you didn't really know if you were
capturing all the opinions within
the particular neighborhood.
Sometimes the responses were really low.
So there's something in survey literature design studies
response bias that wasn't accounted for.
And the most important thing is that they only
reflect the opinions of people in each particular
neighborhoods, in each city.
So many of these individual homeowners
were drawn from neighborhoods with landscapes that
had highly manicured lawns.
So the subjective norm was already
for a high amount of mowed lawns.
So anything that shifted that a little bit, people said it
was too messy.
But in terms of the application of it,
unfortunately I think a lot of talking anecdotally
with landscape architects that use these studies that say,
well, we need certain cues.
And when they go to those cues, they say things, well,
when you do a landscaping practice,
mown yards should cover at least half the front yard.
And that came from one particular study
that Nassauer had done with her students.
Now, I'm not saying that all landscape architects
are interpreting it that way.
But there is this sort of assumption
that these studies represent a general aesthetic view
for all United States homeowners.
When, in fact, because of the flaws I just indicated,
it may not actually reflect that.
So what are the next steps?
Well, we do need--
if anybody's out there and need well-designed studies that
are random, they address different cultures,
different cities, different neighborhoods.
Most of these studies were done in the Midwest, by the way.
And the research should clearly state
to design professionals that there
are constraints to the study.
In other words, if I am surveying homeowners
that have traditional 80% of their front yard mowed,
we have to really understand that that
is creating a different norm than if you went to an older
residential neighborhood that only had 20% mowed yards.
And it kind of begs, how flexible
are people, Even the people with those highly constrained
with subjective norms in their neighborhood?
Would their preference to change if through extension
or through education, you told about the impacts of water
climate change and wildlife?
And there is some research out there.
If you email me, I can send you a couple of citations.
And it says, yes, the education can shift those attitudes
in terms of what they prefer for a yard.
And imagine doing that same survey about the Cues
to Care for people that moved into a neighborhood that
had more natural yards.
Would their preferences shift?
And what if they grew up in a neighborhood
with very little lawns?
So there's all these conditions that
set the stage for what people adopt when they actually
manage their landscapes.
So not the whole nine yards--
so you can imagine on that continuum letting everything
go and succession happen and the whole yard turns
into a more natural area.
But what we found working with neighborhoods and people
over the past 20 years is that you
can have portions of the yard re-wild, not the whole yard,
just a corner or a corner of a backyard.
And you border these with trim bushes or stones,
i.e. some cues that the landscape is being maintained.
I also advocate what's called the lazy lawnmower approach.
So, yeah, you do mow portions of the landscape.
Well, let that get a little tall.
Let the flowers come out.
It really helps pollinators.
And then mow it down.
Instead of doing it every week and a half,
do it every three weeks.
And I'm a firm believer that we need more model
yards to show these examples across different neighborhoods.
Working with developers and planners
and individual homeowners, it really
took that maverick, that first step to do something
a little bit different.
And then that shifted just a little bit.
The neighbor next door started doing something different.
And then people were talking to that person,
saying, hey, what are you doing in your yard?
And when you do these different wild areas in yards,
whether you do it at the offset or you do it
kind of like a retrofit, it really
is important to get that first person
to try something different.
So in summary-- this is a funny photo.
This is Dr. Ray Carthy.
He's known about this photo for years.
I say, how do you reach a typical Florida homeowner,
you know, that has a pool and the barbecue
and the lawn in the back?
So I do agree with the Cues to Care theory
that if you're going to have more natural landscapes,
you can't you can't do it in a vacuum.
You have to pay attention to cultural, economic, and social
values.
But we do need better research to see
what cues are really needed.
How much?
I mean, can we do those little pocket of wild things
with a little trim bush around there
and it's accepted from one neighborhood to the next?
And how can we communicate environmental benefits
across different neighborhoods, across different yards
in how they influence yard preferences?
So for example, one study had shown
that despite initial surveys and then taking them
through extension education training,
then their attitudes shifted in terms of what preferences
they had for their yard maintenance.
And lastly, I think creating those model landscapes--
I can't say how important that is.
From a developer putting it into their sales home,
to a neighborhood with a homeowner association
and working through the homeowner association,
have a couple of neighbors to do those little wild pockets
or pollinator gardens--
that really pays dividends to influence people
throughout the neighborhood.
If you want to learn more about our group,
it's a program free resource of basic communities.
I'm in the Department of Wildlife Ecology
and Conservation.
Candace, if you could, put that--
or I'll put it in the chat room, the buildgreen.ufl.edu.
And there is my email address if anybody
would like to contact me after this presentation.
[MUSIC PLAYING]