Professor Stacy Philpott of UC Santa Cruz will present a seminar at UC Davis focusing on the factors that influence arthropod diversity in urban agroecosystems. The event, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, is scheduled for Wednesday, January 21 at 12:10 p.m. in Briggs Hall, with an option to attend virtually via Zoom.
Philpott’s talk, titled “Social, Local, and Landscape Drivers of Arthropod Diversity, Traits, and Networks in Urban Agroecosystems,” will explore how various social and environmental factors affect biodiversity in urban gardens and farms. According to her abstract: “Urban gardens and farms provide a large fraction of the global food supply, and can be important green spaces for biodiversity conservation, however, there is still a lack of ecological knowledge to inform conservation and maintenance of ecosystem services in these important agroecosystems. This talk will feature three research questions that are part of a larger research program aimed at addressing how social factors, local garden and landscape management affect species richness and traits, species- and trait-based ecological networks, and the provisioning of ecosystem services across urban agroecosystems in the California central coast. Specifically, the talk will address: (1) How does social context of gardens (e.g., the luxury effect, land tenure) influence plant diversity and traits? (2) How do local and landscape filters influence natural enemy abundance, richness and traits? and (3) How do local and landscape factors influence plant-pollinator networks?”
Philpott is currently executive director of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a doctorate in evolutionary biology from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of Washington. After six years on faculty at the University of Toledo in Ohio, she joined UC Santa Cruz in 2012. In 2021 she was named a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America.
On her website, Philpott describes her research focus: “Urban agroecosystems are increasingly important for biodiversity conservation, fresh food access for people, and improving global agricultural sustainability. Understanding the way that these agroecosystems function is thus paramount to science and society. However, most of our scientific knowledge of agroecosystem ecology is in rural agricultural systems. Our interdisciplinary research team uses urban community gardens as a laboratory for scientific investigations to unravel complex ecological relationships, and as a classroom to teach student scientists and citizens about agroecology.”
She adds: “Our research in urban agroecosystems takes place in 25 gardens in the California central coast that vary in local management practices and surrounding landscape characteristics. We investigate the ecological interactions and processes in urban gardens that provide ecosystem services like pollination, pest control, and climate regulation and also benefit human well-being. Our vision is to build a scientific understanding of urban garden ecology, to disseminate management information to urban gardeners, and to improve urban agricultural sustainability for people and the environment.” More details about this work can be found at https://www.urbangardenecology.com/.
For technical issues related to attending the seminar online or other questions about logistics, Marshall McMunn serves as coordinator.
