Bringing Biodiversity to the City

this is askabiologist a program about the living world and I'm Dr biology okay so from The Sounds in the background you probably already know we're not in the studio and you might think we're out in the field but that's not the case we're actually in a backyard but not just any backyard this is the home of Our Guest Julie strongberg and it's pretty much a Wildlife Sanctuary inside the city it's also the motivation behind her new book called bringing home the wild they were aarian Garden in the Southwest City now Julie is a professor of Meritus at Arizona State University and a longtime plan ecologist who specializes in Wetland and riparian ecosystems of the American southwest for this podcast we plan to take a tour of this wild backyard to learn more about why and how this space was created Hey there Julie hi Chuck thank you so much for letting me visit your wild backyard such a pleasure to have you over to welcome you through the portal into our little Paradise in ois in the city you know that's interesting because when I was reading one of your friends said something that it's like walking through a portal when you come in here and I can get just an idea because you know I'm just starting here and actually before we head out can you tell me how big is your quote unquote backyard our backyard and our front yard and side yard well originally it was 13 acres of dying Citrus so we're starting from scratch and now we have four we have neighbors behind us who have an organic Orchard who have several Acres too but parcel is four I Envision it as sort of a series of rooms and trails actually it feels bigger than it is you people get lost back there I can imagine I I'm just looking out right now and I I don't even know where we'd start but talking about being in the city but having the wild here there's a road out here there's developments right next door yes it's pretty amazing to me because that portal really is a portal it really is and there are a lot of neighbors around us that are of a similar mindset of us appreciating the fact that the soils here are amazing they're reto LOM soils they're fertile this this was a historic agricultural area and there's just a tidal wave of tiny houses that are coming in and there's such potential here to have sustainable agriculture to have ecotherapy and just Oasis carbon capture in the city I'm so glad that 25 years ago we did buy up acreage and don't have it densely packed with houses you know they they have trees and um and shrubs and birds it's interesting because we don't always think about these pockets and how important they could be yes we live in an area where we have County islands and those are interesting because they have not really been Incorporated by the cities yet and they have livestock they have uh you know chickens you know goats you name it it's there big parcels and they're interesting because it does help basically protect from getting too much of a dense population that right can't basically Escape itself you know because it's so dense we've had so many insects and birds and plants arrive on our property that we didn't plant and part of that is because when we moved in 25 years ago there was agriculture in the area the road was roughly paved there was irrigation and there were so many wild plants that you could find along the desert streams and populations of insects come and and populate our property and our property can then populate others so we need to have these Stepping Stones of areas where non-human creatures can Thrive so that they can then expand and right there's almost like you've heard terms of wildlife corridors and so these not necessarily a corridor but they are Wildlife Pockets yeah Wildlife pockets and I think that's a great thing before we actually go for our walk I do want to get a little bit of a a vision for everybody we know it's 4 Acres now but um what prompted you to do this yes multiple motivations during my life at Arizona State University I was a riparian researcher and I spent a lot of time traveling to rivers around the southwest and they're beautiful and gorgeous and fascinating but I fell in love with mosqu Bosque which are Woodlands that bordered the Salt River as well as other rivers in the state and I thought wow if I'm going to live in the city I want to live in a mosqu Bas so that was that motivation and I taught Restoration in collegey and I thought well here's a chance to put principles into practice like um some people say restoration is kind of glorified gardening and in a sense it is it's not not quite that and I do come from a long line of gardeners I mean my my mother was a gardener and she taught me to love and appreciate plants and so my gardening fingers just needed a place to be active I also when I was doing my research I went to a a workshop about mosquite as a food source for the indigenous people of the Southwest and for the current inhabitants and so I've been fascinated with sustainable agriculture for a long time because industrial agriculture is is so damaging and people need an alternative so I thought wow we can have birds in the city we can have a food forest in the city we can have a quiet space in the city I the noise of the city is I just can't hack it so I've got to wake up to bird song where I'm going to be a a grumpy ecologist okay no no one wants anybody to be grumpy true so because we're in this wonderful location and it's early in the morning so uh anybody wonders it's it's you know it's like 7 in the morning here and uh that means it's a little bit cooler although not necessarily cool and interestingly enough I saw what looked like some storm clouds so who knows we might even get a bit of a desert shower this morning that would be lovely right oh the smells after the rains are incredible I bet I bet speaking of this let's go where where do you want to go first oh gosh well right here at the gate we have to stop by the the Bersa the elephant tree these grow wild on South Mountain Park which you can see just across the road there and they are an amazing plant with respect to their smells and here take a berry and just crunch between your fingers and and take a whiff presumably you're going to relax yeah yeah and this is um the the compounds in this plant which is in the family that same family that frankincense and myr are in have been proven to reduce your anxiety it's called an angiolytic what a great way to you know if you're going to go to work or go out the door what a great way to start the day you right and and it's a great way to bring your guests in you exactly calm them down right away yeah by the way when you're listening to this if you don't know what this plant looks like we will be putting images in the podcast we do that sort of thing if you have a an app that uh supports that you can see it or you can go to our website and you'll be able to see them as well so just keep that in mind all right what's next well let's head out down this path right now one of the lovely plants that's in bloom is the Desert Willow that was a short walk a short walk yeah so I guess I guess four acres you do get to pack a lot in we pack a lot in yeah so here's the Desert Willow and these are trees that are widely planted in the city as as a landscape plant boy after the rain I mean this the smell is it's it's kind of pungent and just after the rain it's just lovely and delicious the Desert Willow is one we planted so we have a mix of plants that we planted and then the wildlings that came in say we weren't the only ones doing the planting the birds the wind the water brought plants in and one that came in was uh right here this wildling called sacred deura and the rabbits have been nibbling the leaves on this plant and this plant is psychotropic oh really yes and it's been used crazy rabbits crazy rabbits so they're having one heck of a party right now but the sacred dayour is has big broad leaves she's a herbaceous perennial and then in the morning and at the night she beautiful big white tubular flowers that just fill the atmosphere with with a wonderful odor and they attract bees and pollinators and they come in and they have a party and sometimes they will get sort of drugged and I sometimes I like helped a bee out of the flower because you just a little too much and they can't can't find the door all right well we're going to move on a little bit before I join the rabbits or the the bees here right let me see here what's what's next because I mean it is incredibly green it's incredibly Lush uh I could think of myself in basically out in the desert in the kind of those uh transition zones right right and some of our area is irrigated and some is not so we have moisture gradients which is part of what contributes to the diversity so we're we'll stay in the irrigated area for a while and if we just walk a few more steps this way there's a tree that I call the dancing tree the the dancing tree the dancing tree and and not because the tree is dancing all the trees do move they move very slowly much more slowly than we do they will close their leaves up at night they will respond to touch you know they're sensient creatures but um this this is a u Mexican pelarian she's one of the oldest trees on the property just huge and I've pruned some of her lower limbs so that we can go up and climb the tree and just sit in the tree and and uh relax and sit in the tree sit in the tree and but beneath her there's sort of that open area that one time I had some friends over and they just spontaneously broke out and dance so we were dancing out of the tree so she's become known as the dancing tree got it um and this is one that some people call it ratama a Mexican p in some areas some restoration sites one along the Salt River she's not welcomed and she's been poisoned and killed and removed because she's not considered to be part of the historical Flora of the area uh now you're bringing up an important point because there's for those that don't know there's native and non-native is the common terms that might come up and there's a bit of a discussion going on to the fact that what is native and what is non-native and who belongs and shouldn't be there yes there is and it's been going on for a while and it it it can get fairly emotional because you know when you're dealing with issues of belonging and attachment you know those objective science necessarily have the last word and the terms native and non-native are not binary like many things you know it's not black and white their Shades of Gray different lengths of time things have been here different distances they've come plus we're in a changing climate changing CO2 I mean the world is changing so what belonged here 100 years ago is not what belongs here now right and uh that's really common with birds for example mhm in the Phoenix area we have these Rosy faed love birds oh yes we've had them periodically yes yeah yeah and they're not native but they're certainly taking up home in the Phoenix area and there are a lot of birds like that and in some cases those birds that were not native it's important because it turns out they're native quote native habitat right now they're having a great big decline in populations parrots for example many species of parrots are dropping in numbers in their native quote native habitats but they're out in the strangest places inner cities and all without that we would have a problem right so migration adaptation it's ongo and trying to stop it just creating more harm than benefit and people still actually are being taught that sort of very simplistically like native is good non-native is bad and once you learn that it kind of embeds but it's not true a new creature can have a effect that's neutral positive negative and it depends on who's being affected and so it's very complicated we've reduced it to the simplistic idea you can become sort of extreme you know there sort of I mean I love native species I plant them in my yard but I'm not an extremist it doesn't mean I'm going to hate the others you know everyone's welcome in in our yard except the really really pointy prickly ones that I step on and also I guess my driving concern right now is the rapidly changing climate and my motivating factor if you had to limited to one is I want plants out there capturing the carbon sequestering the carbon taking that CO2 out of the atmosphere that we're releasing into it when we burn fossil fuels and so if a plant is thriving and doing well and capturing carbon I'm like go team right go team carbon capture all right so green is good all right so while we're talking about plants you have another term when I was reading the book that I hadn't really come across before and it's plant blindness can we talk a little bit about plant blindness yes plant blindness it was a term that was coined by some botanists who were concerned about the fact that to most people plants are just sort of background material they they don't really notice them if you showed them a picture of like a beautiful forest and it had a little bird in it they would say oh what a lovely bird they would say nothing about the plants like when we even talk about say nature mostly we're talking about plants you know I mean plants are the workhorses in an ecosystem and plants are so critical to our survival I mean they give us the oxygen we breede the food we eat the medicines our housing they function to help regulate the climate and they're so critical to our well-being but uh courses in botney are declining in in universities in grade schools and if I say the word wildli to you like what comes to your mind oh you know pointed ears and whiskers and like that Wildlife includes plants and animals and fungi anything living uh that's not something that humans planted as wild and so that's sort of emblematic of of plant blindness we I mean we're animals you know I love dogs I'm a mammal I love other mammals it's rare to find biologists that really like to focus on Plants so there's a group of people that are trying to counteract plant blindness and just bring plants to the the attention of of more people I absolutely love the space with the the dancing tree but I did promise that we were going to do some more walking around four acres so what's the next St we have to visit the mosquite trees oh the mosquite trees okay yes all right these are a species of mosqu called velvet mosket there are a lot of mosques that are planted in the valley that came from South America but these were the ones that you would found along the Salt River hundreds of years ago and actually when we moved in most of the trees had died because the irrigation had been shut off most of the citrus trees but there were a few velvet mosquite who had survived and so we have a mix of sort of the original velvet mosquite and then ones that we brought in and now they're reproducing on their own right those mosqu trees have really deep roots yes right those tap roots that go way way down so that doesn't surprise me that they were the ones that were surviving and the fruit trees just weren't making it right and mosqu are an amazingly flexible and adaptable tree with respect to their water they do have very deep roots but they also if the water is primarily on the surface they will grow roots uh just below the surface and so these plants are making decisions about where to grow roots and it's they they can hear the water they actually have a twostep process by which they can detect water and hone in on it and so they're proliferating around right now around our irrigation water growing very quickly and the mosqu branches tend to it's not just like a a big tall redwood tree or something their branches fall and to sprawl across the ground so they're as wide as they are tall which makes it really easy to to collect with the pods um so this tree right here is is I call her que que yes um which I believe is an indigenous name for mosquite and this one have a seat you can see I've cleared out a little area where we can sit under her canopy and have a conversation and climb into her if you want Dr biology want the tree he can yeah okay well we maybe later after the podcast but notice all the the pods on the ground they're kind of beige five or six inches long and over the past few years I've been harvesting the pods learning how to collect them and clean them and Mill them and and cook with a flour oh right mosqu flour mosqu flour right the Native Americans really popular very popular you can buy a bag online for like $15 to $20 I'm not in this to make money I'm driven by the idea of sustainable agriculture because mosquit their Roots partner with bacteria that fix nitrogen so they're self- fertilizing you don't have to buy bags of fertilizer and they live for hundreds of years and every year they produce this amazing crop of food which has protein and complex sugars that helps regulate diabetes and if you're gluten-free like I am it's it's an alternative to to wheat flour so I see lots of so how much flour have you gotten this year this year uh so far we've milled uh 30 lb 30 lb 30 lb of flour wow and it's delicious and we could have gotten so much more each year we sort of learn a little bit better how to harvest and I'm thinking when I was at Arizona State University I taught ecology I consider myself an ecologist but here in our 4 Acres I am part of the ecosystem I am eating the food I am breathing the oxygen that the trees are producing I am tending them I'm in a mutualistic partnership with these creatures I'm not just reading about something or writing about something I am part of the ecosystem right and I can't tell you how lovely that feels and I want that others to experience that wow so the other thing I noticed is a lot of birds oh yes I mean we've been walking through here and there have been at least two or three species that I've picked up there uh it's amazing what's going on yes and Matt my husband is the the burder of the two of us he's amazing we've been keeping a record of all the the plants and birds and creatures we've seen on our property I'm a list keeper we're up to 159 species of birds that we've seen or heard on our property of course most of those are not residents some are migratory some are um what are you doing here yeah what's the most unusual oh well gosh one of them they're both a rare species one's um endangered species one is the um the yellow build cuckoo and Summer monsoon this is the time you will see them and they have an amazing call kind of like a drumming sound and they're they' become very rare another one is the uh Southwestern will of fly catcher little bird little tiny bird I mean just gray you know it's like if you didn't really know what you were looking for you wouldn't notice it and a lot of the birds I do not notice it's like Matt points them out to me thankfully but this little bird as the name implies catches flies you know they feed on insects and this bird has lost habitat because riparian forests and Woodlands have been converted to agriculture or cities the water's been diverted and it's a migratory bird flies from Central America to to North America and back and so during our migration season pretty sure that one stopped at our water drip and mads was like Julie you've got to come out on the porch this is little you know this little bird was just darting from the mosquite trees catching insects and yeah that's a Southwestern Little Fly Catcher so and we were talking earlier about Wildlife Corridor and migration corridors and so our property is functioning as a stepping stone for these Aven migrants that need someplace to stop and refuel rest up before they move on to their breathing territory right it's a long trip it is a very long trip right okay so I hear a little bit of rumbling in the background so I think maybe we should walk on just a bit more so what's the next stop oh yes um it's a little bit of a walk to get there uh we're reaching the the western edge of the property where it's getting a little bit drier but look up and what do you see well that's that's a it's a dead eucalyptus tree okay very very tall we did not plant it it was barely alive when we moved in but and it did die from lack of water but in its death this eucalyp tree is providing so much life for so many birdss I mean there cavity nesting birds that are in there Hawks like Harris Hawk and red tail hawks use it as a perching site to visualize their next meal right and it's um it's one that we had a little bit of a a a conflict with the city over I mean having dead trees in your property is not something that they want they want so we had to have a bit of a conversation about why that tree should remain standing and and this tree is a community Landmark because you know Community is important having knowing your neighbors having some sense of of place and space and neighbors would walk by and they would tell us stories about oh that's the tree where the Hawks have their nest you know and it was just sort of an anchor for the neighborhood and I think that that sort of made a difference made a difference okay oh you know you talk about different kinds of birds I have to say that um I have seen some photos from mat of some owlsowl and the baby owls yes yes owlets is that right owlets yes yes there were four owlets this year yeah let's go into the Broadley Forest duck your head there some of the mosqu branches are kind of low so little background these are three Fremont cottonwood trees that that actually came from an experiment that one of my graduate students was working on and at the end of the experiment it's like well what do we do with the survivors you know we're not going to throw them in the trash so they came in to live at our house and other huge trees and Freemont Cottonwood are trees that historically grew along the Salt River iconic riparian tree and now uh they are home to these these family of owls and many other birds as well and this is one of the coolest parts of the yard cool as in in temperature or cool is in cool as in wow this is great no cool as in is in temperature it's hard to ignore the heat it's just pressing concern and I've come out here with students with my infrared temperature sensor and it will be 20 to 25 de cooler under this broadly Forest canopy than out in the open and that's significant when it's you know 110 or something outside or 120 and it gets us into this energy use versus water use TR off because some people have said to me Julie when you were at ASU you you lectured about water and Water Conservation it's like and now aren't you just wasting water like so like well it might look that way but we're not wasting water yes it's water that was diverted from the Salt River but it's going to very good use I mean not just the bird habitat and the food but evapor transpirational Cooling and the trees are capturing carbon and so it as tremendous amount of ecosystem service that these forests are providing and also one of the reasons I wrote the book is just to talk about these multifunctional spaces in the city we're so as a society compartmentalized like in what we do and also the way we use land like oh this land will be used to grow corn this land will be used to golf yeah golf yeah Y and then we'll have our little tiny strip of raring habitat along river so I like this idea of multi-functional spaces where one space you can have agriculture you know Recreation ecotherapy climate capture all in one space and if many people are tending it and taking care of it you feel a part of everything you're not just so compartmentalized and separate you know getting back to this idea of feeling like you're part of an ecosystem and and understanding that we need to take care better care of our ecosystems right we're actually one of the things we've talked about on shows before are the Community Gardens as well those are yes and with you know 8 billion of us humans on the planet we Co-op so many of the planetary resources and like over half of the water and streams are they and used for human use so there's just not much left over in terms of of water or space for wild creatures and there's a big role to play for urban gardeners urban ecologists urban dwellers to share some of these Resources with our nonhuman neighbors and coexist so the storm actually is coming this way which for us we love rain those people out there that don't like rain you know you can come to Arizona because you won't get a lot of it but soon you will become a rain lover because it's something that uh we don't get a lot of and we love these summer storms oh yeah summer storms this is lovely yeah let's let's walk over here to the China Berry Tree which is right by the this corrugated um roof on our what we call the Pavilion little storage area um the China Berry Tree all right so all right well it's a good thing we got over here cuz there is some rain here so let's let's talk about this what you said China Berry Tree China Berry Tree yeah and this was one of the the few trees that had survived when we moved in and because as you can see here there's a big irrigation structure and it's an old system it's leaky so even if we weren't irrigating at that time but the neighbors were so there was a little bit of water that leaked and kept this this Cherry China berry tree growing it was one of those trees that was planted decades ago it's in the mahogany family it has incredibly hard wood beautiful wood fairly drought tolerant but also these big broad leaves so it's a very good Urban Tree to provide shade and cooling but also withstand periodic droughts it's one of these trees that are clonal so she sends off trees have modular growth so she sends off little sheets of herself so she pops up 20 or 30 ft away yeah yeah so that's not a Seedling that's just another piece of herself that she she produced but this tree is fascinating because we heard the Cardinal and we do have this nesting pair of cardinals which are just lovely but in the China Berry actually we see every year are robins American Robins I've never seen a robin here I know and I came from Wisconsin and you know you sort of take Robins for granted so it was just so exciting and they were feeding on the China bear Beres there's some berries that that humans can't necessarily eat but birds can and this is one of them we did have one experience when one of our dogs actually decided to munch on the China berries and got a little bit drunk took him to the vet and he said yeah just let him sleep it off and he'll be fine and he was did he learn he did learn yeah okay all right well that's good yeah one thing about these storms is they're fun to have but they don't last all that long sometimes this one seems to be waning you said that this was a an orchard before yes this was a citrus Orchard and we do have our own little traditional fruit orchard right and so I was hoping we'd go yeah definitely have to go over there that's a bit of a walk okay all right so we we'll start out you guys get to teleport we'll do the walking okay so here's the orchard it doesn't look like an orchard to me to be fair looks more like a a meadow yeah well when when we first mov then I was still using the lawn mower and but then over the years I just stopped mow less and less and I remember one time I was out in mowing a strip in the orchard so the water could flow better and and I saw this butterfly and it turned out to be a a buckeye butterfly just gorgeous I thought what am I doing why am I using this machine to just create havoc and so now the the the orchard has marked into a meadow so we have some fruit trees there's a few citrus trees and then pomegranates which are just delicious and then the peach trees one of my favorites okay and looks like I could even try a peach you should definitely try a peach hope you're not wearing a shirt you care a lot about cuz it's going to drip some juice on you okay well I'm going to I'll try one very sweet and then take a look just to the left of the peach tree we had an almond tree here we were trying to grow almonds and the tree just did not farewell so we just left the dead tree there and Vines scrambled up and over it and now we have passion Vines um uh Claus Vine we have snail Vine that we actually eat the flowers of and it's just a great substrate for plants for butterflies and also food for us and right those passion Vines have those beautiful flowers oh they're amazing and what is it the frary butterflyes absolutely love those and we have one in our backyard oh nice so Julie before I forget because I I know we could spend all morning if not longer on this I always ask three questions of my scientists okay so while we're in the orchard while it's a little bit calm let's go ahead and start with the questions okay ready all right so the first question is when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist was there ever an aha moment or did it just sneak up on you oh I knew pretty early on when I was a little girl I would collect data on anything ridiculous things like I was eating a bag of M&M's and I'd keep track of how many red M&M's how many different color M&M's like you know there weren't any questions behind but I was collecting data and my my father was a history professor at the University and my mother loved plants and I had this sort of data driven analytical questioning mind and so I I kind of think I fused my parents um my father had his intellectual academic path and my mother was a a gardener Who Loved plants and all things wild and I sort of fused that into becoming an academic U plant ecologist oh well the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to be a little bit mean okay and this is just a thought question because I'm going to take it all away you can't be a scientist o you you in this case you weren't a scientist okay uh I know you'd be easily shifting to gardening and farming so I'm going to take that you take that away too that was my next and you've written a book so I'm going to take some of the writing and I know you love teaching because most of us that do that teaching and what I'm trying to do is what if I took a lot of these things away that that were basic basically your career your life if you had gone another Direction what would you be what would you do I would be a not a trainer of dogs a trainer of people that have dogs really yes because I remember it was this big decision back in in undergraduate like oh should I be a veterinarian or should I be a um Bist not like to say the the plants ultimately pulled harder than the dogs but I do spend a lot of time volunteering with dogs at the animal shelter and it just that that human dog Bond just needs attention people need to be trained and um they need to learn dog language and body language and you how to communicate so that's a passion of mine too oh I like that you know we always talk about training the dog but we don't really talk about training the dog owner yes oh yeah the dog usually wants to please they but they you have to be able to to listen and understand what what they're about and yeah I like it I like it all right and the last question with um your years of experience you probably have answered this before what advice would you have for a young scientist or perhaps someone who was doing something else they're in a different career maybe they maybe they were the dog trainer that decides they want to become the scientist what advice would you have for them I would say get Outdoors get out of your computer screen get out of your book meet people practice try things just internships volunteer experiences when I was young I I volunteered at at a Schlitz Autobon Center in Wisconsin and it's a supplement to what you learn in lectures and books and and um so yeah just just get out there and try new things out there and some real world I guess well you know the other thing Julie before I go I usually say my guests go but in this case I I'm going to have to leave this wonderful wild backyard would you do me a favor could you read a little piece from your books I mean we've been carrying it around here it's not a huge book so if anybody wants to tackle it it's not going to take them long it's got pictures yes pictures and phot it's definitely worth checking out so the rain has stopped enough so that I think you can do it without getting wet and I'll let you take it from here okay this is the start of chapter 5 which I call the consumers and it's eating local snatching The Bagel score I snatched a whole bagel from the trash can I can't stand it when people waste food I hope no one was watching I was attending an event at an animal shelter near our house while also looking out for my own PEC we have only four dogs but that as many mouths to feed explaining why I get excited when I find free food as I was driving home from the bagel snatching event I saw a skinny Rottweiler at an overturned garbage can she was scarfing down scraps as I got out of the car to help to help rescue not to help scarf I'm not that feral yet I pondered the bond between our two species food was at the root of our relationship with dogs and remains so today wolves hunted with our ancestors warned them of danger and scaven in their waste piles our ancestors in turn played with their puppies and ate them during times of scarcity you one does what one needs to survive I suppose a strong and enduring partnership ensued waste makes me fret as does thinking about the systemic changes our society needs to make soon if we were to feed the 8 billion of us and our companion animals without irreparably damaging our soil and our above ground ecosystems too not wasting food is one place to start going very local is good too we in our own 4 acre patch of green increasingly nibble off the land in from the productivity of our deep rich aluvial Rito LOM Prime Farmland soil I don't know if you've tried to feed yourself from your own garden if you have you know how much effort goes into producing even a single grain of an edible grass if you were an Urban Farmer I'm guessing it wasn't you who Toss The Bagel right wow I agree as much as I would love to stay around I am going to have to head on home and it is getting a little bit warmer here so Julie thank you so much for letting me come out and experience this portal into another world oh you're very welcome it's so wonderful to have people come over and to be able to share our space and our vision with them you have been listening to askab biologist and my guest has been Julie stomberg a professor of Meritus at Arizona State University and she's a PL ecologist who specializes in Wetland and raran ecosystems she's also the author of the book called bringing home the wild a riparian garden in a Southwest City we'll be sure to put the link in the show notes so you can find it if you are interested I think it's a fun read and a quick read so it's definitely worth picking up the asob biologist podcast is usually produced on the campus of Arizona State University and recorded in the Grassroots Studio hous in the School of Life Sciences which is an academic unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences but today well you can tell we've been out in the wild but we didn't have to go very far maybe we'll get more of these spaces um think about making your own it doesn't have to be 4 Acres it can be small also a quick reminder if you haven't subscribed to this podcast please take a moment to do so so you don't miss out on any future episodes and remember even though our program is not broadcast live you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website the address is askab biologist. asu.edu or you can just use your favorite Search tool and enter the words ask a biologist as always I'm Dr biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy