Saving the Planet One Plant at a Time – A Talk by Dr. Iara Lacher
Date/Time
Thursday, October 12, 2017
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Location
Green Spring Gardens
Categories No Categories
How a community’s renewed love of native plants
can contribute to large-scale biodiversity conservation
VNPS programs are free and open to the public
We are living in an era of unprecedented environmental change, largely attributed to human activity, coined the “Anthropocene.” Conservation scientists are seeking solutions that can be rapidly applied and effective at large spatial scales. Scientists’ reliance on the latest technology and advanced methods may make these solutions seem “out of reach” for much of the public. But, the truth is the application of this work is local, relies on active community participation, and is easy to integrate. By focusing on what we love, in this case through the creation of native plant gardens, we can literally bridge neighbors together, connecting ourselves to the greater landscape and providing Invaluable contributions to wildlife conservation efforts.
Dr. Lacher earned a PhD in Ecology from the University of California at Davis, where her dissertation evaluated the climatic responses of native plant species and the use of species distribution models to predict extinction risk. Her current work combines scenario planning and spatially explicit land use models to illustrate how different land use features may impact biodiversity and ecosystem services. She is presently a post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, VA and is a section editor for the UC press journal Case Studies in the Environment.
