Reversing habitat loss: Change starts at home
From a policy standpoint, California’s habitat loss crisis may seem intractable. California’s population and level of development is only projected to grow as the state’s economy remains one of the most dynamic worldwide, and with it, the region’s highly biodiverse ecosystems will find themselves under greater and greater pressure. There are a number of legislative policies that can make significant progress in helping to preserve biodiversity, but that’s a subject for a different time. Let’s forget about lawmakers and ecosystem-scale land conservation for a moment, and zoom into your backyard.
A non-native fan palm in Los Angeles. (Seauton on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
If you live in California, chances are that the plants in and around your property are ornamentals from somewhere else on the planet - ornamentals like these form the majority of the plant stock in California’s biggest cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. While beautiful, these ornamentals provide little value for the beneficial insects, birds, and other forms of biodiversity that make California their home.
A Hutton’s Vireo. (Minette Layne on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
On the contrary, animals native to a region have evolved for millions of years in conjunction with the plants native to that same region. Take the example of birds such as the Hutton’s Vireo, a California specialty. The vireo is an insect specialist, relying on a steady supply of insect prey that it can glean from tree foliage throughout the year. However, California’s native insects have evolved to feed and breed on California native plants, not ornamentals, which means that in order to keep the food source of the Hutton’s Vireo stable, an abundance of native plants on the landscape is needed. That’s why Hutton’s Vireos are a dime a dozen in healthy groves of native Coast Live Oak anywhere in California, but usually completely absent from the vast swathes of ornamental Crape Myrtles and Ginkgo trees that blanket the urbanized Los Angeles Basin.
The implication of this reality is both incredibly simple and powerful. In order to help remedy biodiversity loss in California, one of the most essential things for us to do is to increase the prevalence of native plants in urban areas. That’s something each and every one of us can do in our own backyards!
Our mission at NativeBiota is to promote community-based and scientifically sound solutions to help protect and recover native biodiversity. To that end, we consider native landscaping, or the use of easy and beautiful native plants in garden applications, one of our most effective tools. If you’re wondering how to get started with native landscaping, there’s already quite a bit of information on our website - the most relevant bits are linked below. This list is constantly updating as we publish more and more educational material on native landscaping.
No matter how much you know about or are interested in gardening, if you share our goal of helping conserve native species, the next time you’re looking for something to plant in your yard, see if you can find a native plant! At the end of the day, if you live in California, your garden may play a crucial role in saving the incredible flora and fauna of one of America’s only biodiversity hotspots.
