Features
For the Bees and Birds
U of G community members help lead charge for pollinator park on former city landfill site
BY ANDREW VOWLES
What do you do with an old landfill site? You might turn it into a haven for bees, butterflies and other pollinators that are responsible for helping to feed much of the Earth, including us. If advocates on and off campus have their way, the City of Guelph's decommissioned Eastview landfill will become home to what may be the first pollinator park in the world, says Prof. Karen Landman, Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD).
Plans to bring the 51-hectare dumpsite alive with blooms and bees are being pursued by U of G faculty and students, city officials and environmental groups, for several reasons.
The key one is the need to provide a home and food source for pollinators, mostly such insects as bees, butterflies and flies but also hummingbirds. Pollinator numbers have fallen across North America, a concern for biologists, farmers and consumers alike. Guelph needs such a park, says Landman, “because we all eat. One-third of our food comes via pollinators. A lot of crop production depends on it.”
Practically speaking, there are few other alternatives for the former dumpsite. Its capped surface won't support trees and is unsuitable for sports fields. City council has approved use of the landfill portion itself as a passive park. (Another 30 hectares adjacent to the dump that weren't used for landfill have been approved for use as sports fields.) The dump opened in 1961 and closed in 2003.
Landman and others hope the site will remain as a meadow, with native plants chosen to provide food and habitat for pollinators. That's what has naturally begun to occur on the site, now covered with grasses and flowering plants. The site also contains about 60 wellheads, where methane generated in the landfill is collected and used to make electricity.
The idea for a pollinator park arose last spring when Prof. Peter Kevan, Environmental Biology, spoke to municipal staff about declining pollinator numbers.
“I thought it was an appropriate use,” says Jyoti Pathak, parks planner for the City of Guelph's community design and development services. “The plants we will use would need to be pollinator-friendly.”
Since then, U of G landscape architecture students have drafted park designs and shared their ideas with professional practitioners, city officials and environmental groups. No commitments have yet been made for the former landfill, says Pathak, who notes that any concrete plans for a park would need detailed proposals, funding and council approval.
Referring to her students' work, Landman says: “We're training landscape architects to be aware of issues.” Other benefits for students and researchers would include lessons about incorporating such a concept into an urban setting (including homes recently built nearby), opportunities to study pollinator biology and migration, and ideas about ecological rehabilitation.
Landman belongs to a research group led by Kevan that received funding this fall from the University's Environmental Science Research Initiative to develop the idea further. That group includes experts in landscape architecture, plant agriculture, integrative biology, environmental biology and geography.
The proposed pollinator park is one of the projects involving the Canadian Pollination Initiative, a fledgling network of researchers across the country interested in pollination biology. Kevan is co-leader of that initiative and is working with Victoria MacPhail, a recent M.Sc. graduate of Guelph, on a larger funding application to study the field and raise public awareness of such issues as the recent pollinator decline.
MacPhail says scientists need to obtain better baseline data about pollinator species and their role in seed and fruit production, including effects of such threats as habitat loss and fragmentation, pesticides, parasites and disease. Using funding from the David Suzuki Foundation, she is completing a guidebook to be published next year about native pollinator-friendly plants.
“If you want to plant in your backyard, this would be a resource,” she says.
Bees, for example, like wild strawberry and chokecherry. Butterflies and other pollinators are attracted to various native milkweeds.
“Many of these plants attract a diversity of pollinators — not just one specific type — and pollinators need a continuous succession of flowering plants throughout the growing season.”
Landman says she'd benefit from knowing more about pollinator gardens here in Guelph. Those lessons would probably also extend back to the classroom, where the former longtime design consultant now teaches planting design. “These are plants we all need to learn about.”