Pollinator Corridors
This blog is part of a series, led by the Youth4Nature USA Team, to celebrate World Bee Day (May 20, 2020).
Today, as you may know, is Bee Day. As a person who lives in the northeast United States, I’ve recently been witness to the amazing work people around here are doing on protecting and restoring pollinator habitats. Many of these projects involve or are led by youth and can be adapted or replicated in your own community, so I’ll give a few examples.
My town is going to become the first of an initiative to establish a series of “Pollinate Now! Communities” (PNC). This is a program that its co-founder Sue Sie notes will “draft and work to pass pollinator-friendly government policy, engage anchor institutions and large landholders to develop and implement pollinator action plans, and educate and empower local community members to transform their homes and businesses into pollinator habitats. The program will also offer low or no cost starter plants and installation support through collaborations with local nurseries and student work corps.” Eventually our town will be connected with others, creating a significant pathway.
One of the goals of PNC, and other projects like the Great Barrington, MA Pollinator Action Plan, is to create pollinator corridors. What are those, you may ask?
A pollinator corridor is basically a pathway that will offer contiguous habitat and forage to vulnerable native species. This can be achieved through having small pollinator habitats, like roadside flower beds and home gardens, connect with the bigger habitats such as parks and meadows.
This photo is from the Great Barrington Pollinator Action Plan.
I am excited to be working with Pollinator Now! and a group of students from the Conway School for Landscape Design and Planning, who are developing a sustainable master plan for a local park, which will include assessments of pollinator habitat, hydrology, stormwater infrastructure, trail use and maintenance, invasive species, climate change impacts, and user needs. The pollinator part has especially become a focus because our community garden is situated on the park land, and another pollinator habitat garden is in development by my youth organization, Hudson Valley Wild, at the nearby library. This habitat garden will also serve an educational purpose, with signage explaining how pollination works, the different types of pollinators and their importance for ecosystem services.
Another example of the implementation of pollinator corridors is at the State University of New York, New Paltz, which has a bee-friendly campus; many locations around the campus have pollinator friendly native plants. The Bee-Friendly Campus is a program for implementation in universities and K-12 schools.
It is important that we promote the protection of pollinators and their habitats, which are being diminished at unprecedented rates. This can be done through education, which all of these initiatives have as a focus, as well as action within your community to create these connected areas in which pollinators can thrive.
About the Author:
Scout Pronto Breslin is a high school student whose work focuses on bringing the topics of biodiversity and nature based solutions into conversations around the climate crisis, predominantly at youth climate summits. She is also leading the Nature Based Solutions Working Group on her town’s Climate Smart Communities Task Force and was a 2019 Coalition Wild Ambassador.