bringing nature home with Dr. Douglas Tallamy

RESTORING NATURE'S RELATIONSHIPS AT HOME
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Douglas Tallamy is professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware where he has researched the relationship between insects and plants and how it impacts the diversity of animal communities. Tallamy won the Silver Medal from the Garden Writer's Association for his book, “Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants (2007),” which has been among the top 4 best-selling books on Amazon in the Landscape category for the last 10 years. Bringing Nature Home has sparked a national conversation about the link between healthy local ecosystems and human well-being.

At the Wild America Nature Festival, Dr. Tallamy will discuss how the specialized relationships between animals and plants are the norm in nature rather than the exception. Plants that evolved in concert with local animals provide for their needs better than plants that evolved elsewhere.  Tallamy will explain why this is so, why specialized food relationships determine the stability and complexity of the local food webs that support animal diversity, why our yards and gardens are essential parts of the ecosystems that sustain us, how we can use our residential landscapes to connect the isolated habitat fragments around us and produce valuable ecosystem services, and what we can do to make our landscapes living ecosystems once again. Managing landscapes in this crowded world carries both moral and ecological responsibilities that we can no longer ignore.

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