Hi EwA Friends! It’s been a while, but I’m back with another dispatch from the EwA Virtual Library! The library has grown to an impressive size—we now have just over 600 items in our Zotero collection. We’ve added some helpful new collections to explore, including a multi-pronged section full of EwA-specific resources for mentorship, leadership, data collection and curation (make sure to check the subcollections!), and a link to submit materials for the library. We’ve also added a new tag for articles featured in past and current EwA interns’ news digests. The notes section of each article now includes the title and author of the digest it was featured in, so we can look back at the work our interns have contributed to our collective learning!
Making a large, ever-growing resource like the EwA Library accessible is a real nesting doll of a project. Right now, I’m working on a tag clean-up effort that will hopefully make the library easier to navigate and add works to. Sorting and cleaning tags can be tedious work, but I’m having so much fun exploring the broad range of subjects that our library houses while I tidy up.
This time around, the plant-pollinator interaction tag really caught my eye. I left my corporate job shortly before joining EwA to train as a professional gardener, and the lessons that stuck with me the quickest were ones that carefully considered pollinators as our true “clients.” While we’re buried in snow here in Massachusetts, I’m thinking about the ways some of my favorite pollinator insects’ relationships to native New England plants are quietly continuing, for example, in the tall, hollow, woody stems we purposely left behind during fall garden clean-up. But this type of relationship is just one of so many! Some plant-pollinator works I loved reading in our library include: A study on female moths using acoustic signals to decide where to lay their eggs Observations on the difference between habitat fragmentation’s effects on pollinator diversity in open-habitat systems vs. closed canopy forest systems (and the importance of empirical field studies in debunking generalizations!) Research on bumble bee tactics for fighting flowering plant scarcity And a huge bibliography of writings on the evolution of plant-insect interactions.
I’m eager to learn more about the relationships between different plants and insects, so if you see or read something you’d like to share, add it to our library intake spreadsheet! And if you have any feedback on the library or these posts, or just want to say hi, you can always reach me at ashle...@earthwiseaware.org. |
