Foragings:: The latest news, resources, designs and more

 News

• Nature and the City:: “If we are ever to reach the stage where we can value the benefits as ecosystem services, or design therapeutic landscapes, we need to understand what the benefits are and how they operate.”
• A Wilder Way:: Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf, who is responsible for the planting design of the High Line in New York City, is the subject of this interesting profile.
• Urban Rivers of Life:: “There are few natural features as important as rivers and streams in defining cities, in shaping sense of place, and in connecting us with nature.”
• First Person: Letting a Backyard Go Wild::  James Barilla, author of the new book “My Backyard Jungle,” writes about his backyard on National Geographic.
• How Ecologists Are Using Surveys to Support Urban Green Roof Architecture:: “With all the knowledge, experience and conviction of how important living architecture and green infrastructure is, why is integrated ecological design for green buildings not a fundamental standard to how we do things?”
• Leicester’s urban meadow created ‘to attract more bees’:: “Wildflowers are to be planted around a triangle of empty land in Leicester to try to attract more bees to the area.”
• Get Ready to Get Funky!:: The Funk Nests challenge from Celebrate Urban Birds is now running for a couple more weeks.
• Chicago’s Natural History: What Remains Unknown? Almost Everything:: ‘Secondly, if we start to develop and monitor effective strategies for maintaining biodiversity in cities around the globe, this may be a compelling way of advocating for conservation elsewhere.”
• Fresh tracks: Chicago’s new ‘sky park’ turns abandoned rails into green spaces:: “Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pledged to create 800 new parks, recreation sites, and green spaces throughout the city over the next five years.”
• Mechanisms of Resilience & Other ‘Re-Words’ in Urban Greening:: “What can we learn about how humans relate and reconnect with nature in dire circumstances? And how can that learning about what we do in urgent circumstances be applied to longer term thinking about sustainability and resilience?”
• Saving city wildlife – with democracy:: “The public can – and should – be drawn into the process of ranking development priorities so that important decisions such as protecting wildlife are made by citizens rather than planners.”
• Parks as Green Infrastructure, Green Infrastructure as Parks: How Need, Design and Technology Are Coming Together to Make Better Cities:: What is green infrastructure?
• The Hidden World of Soil Under Our Feet:: “One of the most important threats to biodiversity has received little attention — though it lies under our feet.”
• A year in the life of an urban meadow:: “This slideshow documents the rise and fall of annual plants at the Inch Park urban meadow in Edinburgh.”
• Architecture and Urban Ecosystems: From Segregation to Integration:: “During modern era of human development, growth of towns and cities displayed a separation between nature and human activities. This was not the case in premodern times, when human settlements either integrated or co-existed peacefully with the nature.”
  

Resources

•  What Good Are Wasps?:: A question that is asked regularly this time of the year, here’s what you need to know about the benefits of wasps.
• Bee Imposter on the Loose:: This interesting post features bee flies which are large, fuzzy flies which are often mistaken for bees.
• iBook of Common Ants:: A free book about common ants is now available for download in PDF format from Your Wild Life.
• How to be a Citizen Naturalist:: Fantastic tips for the millennial generation on how to connect with nature.
• Gardening For Wildlife – Going Potty:: Excellent tips for creating container gardens for wildlife.
• Wildlife Watch – Activity Sheets:: Illustrated downloadable sheets with a huge variety of activites for kids and adults on interacting with wildlife and creating habitat.
• Landscaping in the Pacific Northwest – Native Plants (PDF):: Tips for planning and planting a native plant garden.
• Naturehoods:: “This Naturehoodsapplication explores this variation to characterize how residents might experience nature differently at the neighborhood scale.”
• The Wide World of Urban Nature:: “Orion assembled a panel of urban ecologists from across North America for a wide-ranging discussion of urban nature and how this fascinating field of study is evolving.”
• Olmsted Online:: A fascinating database of plans and history of Olmsted Firm designed places.
• Red Columbine (Aquilegia formosa):: “Hummingbirds and butterflies are attracted to Red Columbine and use their long tongues to lap nectar from inside the flower’s spurs. Smaller pollinators, such as bees, can crawl into the spurs.”
• The Urban Bestiary: My New Book, Coming in September:: I’m very excited about this new book from the author of Crow Planet. “It is my passionate belief that daily connection with the natural, wild worldmatters.  It makes us more creative, responsive, responsible, imaginative, wild, and happy inhabitants of our home communities. It also allows these communities–made up of humans and myriad other animals—to flourish.  The Urban Bestiary is a song—a symphony, really—in support of this belief.”
• Roundabouts: Our neglected nature reserves? (PDF):: “Roundabouts are common in our towns and cities but how many of us realise – as we jostle for position and try to avoid being cut up by other drivers – that we are circling a habitat not only startlingly rich in biodiversity but in some cases, full of rare and unusual species of insects.”

Design

• Asian Cairns by Vincent Callebaut:: A fantastical architectural design “to introduce natural ecosystems into cities with designs for “farmscrapers” made from piles of giant glass pebbles for a site in Shenzhen, China”.
• Spreading the Green Roof Bug:: A profile of a roof certified as wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.
• Blue Water Roof Garden:: Designer Nigel Dunnet gives an overview of his garden from the 2013 Chelsea Flower Show.
• The medal-winning RBC Blue Water Roof Garden: rainwater for a living roof:: Another profile of Nigel Dunnett’s garden design.
• Interview: Nigel Dunnett On Planting Design:: More insight to the design philosophy of designer Nigel Dunnett.
• Re-Use of Abandoned Land:: An interesting series of case studies showing how neglected landscapes have been revitalized with new designs.
• David Attenborough opens Essex nature reserve built on London’s waste:: “Thurrock Thameside nature park, which rests on a rubbish dump, has been officially opened by Sir David Attenborough.”
• Just genius: Bristol urban meadow project lands Mayor’s top award:: “An innovative project to transform Bristol’s urban environment by planting meadows for pollinating insects has won the Mayor of Bristol’s Genius Award, one of the city’s Festival of Ideas Awards.”
• Botanical Barges:: “The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has a new idea for saving the bay: Install floating, fertilizer-sipping wetlands in Virginia’s small lakes and storm water ponds.”
• Interface Announces Biophilic Design Winner:: “Rebolo Eco-Park was selected as the most unique, inspiring and purposeful way of reconnecting a space with nature.”
• Black Redstarts on London Olympic Green Roof:: “Green roofs do work work for biodiversity and they do work for black redstarts.”
• ‘New Dutch’ tiles transform pitched roofs into lush urban habitats:: “Designed specifically for vegetation-unfriendly pitched roofs, Roel de Boer’s ‘New Dutch’ roofing tiles are noise-absorbing, rainwater-filtering, energy-saving ‘stepping stones for wildlife in the city.'”

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