Portland State Magazine Spring 2015

SPRING 2015 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 15 P ORTLANDERS LOVE green space—from natural areas like the Keller Woodland and Laurelhurst Park to their own backyards. Now, researchers at Portland State and Oregon State University are taking a closer look at how those backyard habitats impact biodiversity in an urban setting. Marion Dresner, environmental science and management faculty, leads the study of yards that are part of Portland’s Backyard Habitat Certification Program. The program, run by the Portland Audubon Society and the Columbia Land Trust, certifies yards based on the level of natural habitat they provide for native plants and animals, as well as pesticide and invasive weed reduction and stormwater management. The program offers three levels of certification: silver, gold and platinum. These natural Oregon settings nestled in urban areas are verdant and lush, but Dresner, PSU students and collaborators at OSU are seeking to learn how much these spaces actually support diversity in native bird and bug populations. The group has been collecting bird, bug and native plant counts in Portland backyards since 2012, using a $5,000 research stim- ulus grant Dresner received from PSU. While the researchers have found trends that suggest native habitats support more biodiversity—especially in neighborhoods near nature areas such as Hillsdale’s Keller Woodlands—they now are looking to expand their study and allow “citizen scientists” to collect data in order to get a more complete picture of urban biodiversity and its relation to yard habitats. These citizen scientists—homeowners sharing information about the flora and fauna of their yards—will be instrumental in broadening the scope of the study enough to allow research- ers to make substantiated claims about how backyard habitats support urban biodiversity. “We would like to train Backyard Habitat participants who are interested to help us make these collections and to help us involve other yard owners in a given neighborhood,” Dresner says. “We could have a tremendous amount of data to use, as well as a more highly ecological-literate population.” WR I T T E N B Y B E S S PAL LAR E S Clockwise from upper left: Northern flicker, photo by Jim Cruce; western meadowrue, photo by Tammi Miller; collomia, photo from Backyard Habitat; bee on rabbitbrush, photo from Backyard Habitat.