transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[00:30] You're listening to the Native Plants Healthy Planet Podcast, presented by Pine Lands Nursery. Here are your hosts, Fran Chismar and Tom Knezick.

Speaker 3:
[00:54] Welcome back to the Native Plants Healthy Planet podcast presented by Pineland's Nursery. I am Fran Chismar.

Speaker 4:
[00:59] And I'm Tom Knezick, and welcome to episode 200, not 200, 313. I'm shorting ourselves. We're joined by two very special recurring guests, and possibly a third that we haven't heard from before. But realistically, I'd really like to thank Dr. Douglas Tallamy for coming back on, and then also Dr. Michael Curran, a student of Dr. Tallamy's. How long ago was that, Mike? I don't want to say the wrong time frame.

Speaker 5:
[01:29] 2006 to 2008. I was 2006. I took Dr. Tallamy's behaviorally college, you have been checked, of course. And then I worked as a lab technician for him throughout the rest of my undergrad.

Speaker 3:
[01:42] I know you've talked about it on the podcast before. Can you tell us the scenario in which you got into that class?

Speaker 5:
[01:49] Yeah, I was in Fiji on a study abroad over winter break, and this was before everything was done online. So I guess my parents got a note back in New Jersey saying that I wasn't registered for enough classes. I at the time was a biology education major, and my dad went through the course catalog, and it was between Genetics or Behavioral Ecology of Insects were the only two biology classes that would work towards my degree that had any openings. That happened to be a PhD level class, so I think my dad called Dr. Tallamy and said, you know, my son needs these credits. So, yeah, he was kind enough to let me jump in that class as an undergrad. And yeah, it was probably my favorite course of my undergrad. And then that led to me working with him as a lab tech. And then he got me on a study abroad to go to Costa Rica to study restoration ecology. And that's kind of really what I think jumpstarted my career.

Speaker 3:
[02:51] Doug, do you remember Mike as a student? Like we were just saying, 45 years, the amount of students that have come through your classroom. Do you remember Mike from that? Like obviously you've worked with him since then, so yes. But like, does that timeframe, did Mike stand out to you at all at that point?

Speaker 6:
[03:13] I do remember Mike. I didn't realize, I don't remember his father calling me and I don't realize, don't remember how he got into the course. But I do remember Mike in Costa Rica, sitting on a rock. We were near some body of water. I guess it was the ocean. I remember Mike sitting there and he's looking at me and he said, I get it. I said, okay, that's what we're doing. Then yeah, worked for me and we've communicated since. But you're right, I've interacted with a lot of students and I do forget most of them. Every once in a while, I meet one, I look at them and they say, do you remember me and it's like, but I do clearly remember Mike.

Speaker 3:
[03:57] Well, I could see how as a professor, it's much easier to make an impact on someone as they would make an impact on you. Just because you're the one lecturing compared to the work that they're doing. But are there, I don't know that we asked you about this one. Are there, like obviously, Mike stands out because the two of you are with us today talking. Do you have other student success stories that have gone on where you've changed our lives and they're doing great work? Is it someone that we would know or someone that we should know because they're doing such fantastic work?

Speaker 6:
[04:37] No, I always think of students at the graduate student level. Desiree Narango, for example, I just was with her yesterday. She's the best PhD student I ever had. She's following suit doing heavy duty science up in Vermont. Several of my students, way back when I had Nate Erwin, who ran the insect zoo at the Smithsonian for a number of years. I think he's retired at this point. They're scattered around, they're scattered around. But you know, we, University of Delaware, our department did not have a PhD program for the first 20 years that I was there. So the only students we interacted with were master students. And it took a while to get the PhD program up and running. So I don't have the number of grad, at least at the PhD level that you might think I have in my career. I also have a really terrible memory. So when you start asking about names, that's not going to work. But I am at the age where I can pull out the dementia card and it works every time.

Speaker 3:
[05:50] Did you, now that you have time to reflect on it a little bit, did you ever think that you would touch, besides students, that you would reach the amount of people that you've reached and made a difference? You know, the one thing for me, there's a lot of people that would consider themselves like Native Plant Influencers. I think what separates you from the rest of this class is just your life long body of research that you've done and finding a way to communicate it to the average person. I think that's maybe one of your greatest contributions is taking all this scientific work and making it so that anyone can pick up a book and read it and understand it. Did you ever think that you would have this kind of impact? I would imagine at this point, it has to have hit you the impression that you've made, but was that your goal when you wrote your first book?

Speaker 6:
[06:50] No. That's a trick question. The goal was, I mean, this was important stuff and the goal was to tell the people who were managing the landscapes across the country and that's private landowners. Hey, we're doing it wrong. We need to pay attention to ecosystem function on our private property. That was important. I knew that was important. And I did want to get that message out. Did I think anybody would read Bringing Nature Home? Did I think it would actually work? No, no way. And no, it wasn't, you know, my goal to become an influencer. I'm a terrible activist. Well, I don't know. It's mostly accidental. It was certainly never the plan. You know, before Cindy and I moved to our current house, that was the year 2000, I just studied behavioral ecology. I was, you know, how do cucumber beetles choose their mates? And why do some insects have the father take care of the young instead of the mother? Now, to me, those are interesting questions, but nobody else cares, you know. So it wasn't, it really wasn't until we moved into this property and it was loaded with invasives and I realized, hey, this is wrecking the food web. That changed the direction of my research. A lot of people say, oh, you changed my life. And I'm thinking, I changed my life because it really turned everything around immediately. And what fed on that was that it was something the public cared about. They really do want to be part of the solution. And that's really rewarding. And I'd rather spend your time working on something that might be interesting, but nobody cares. Now I'm doing something that people do care about. It is important. And that's rewarding to me.

Speaker 3:
[08:36] And I could be wrong. But to me, once someone cares about that, they don't stop caring about it. It's not like they come and go like a fad. It just continues to grow, which is amazing. And they in turn help inspire other people. So if you're looking at like a coaching tree almost, it's pretty amazing how many people you've reached if you look at that tree.

Speaker 6:
[09:04] Now, you know, I do remember probably 15 years ago at least, maybe more, there was a woman in Manhattan. And I don't remember her name. She was a horticulture person. And she said, I mean, this native plant thing is just a fad. It's going to pass. And I'm thinking, you know, the plants that have been here forever are a fad. I don't think they're going anywhere. I think they're here to stay. And we better start recognizing that.

Speaker 3:
[09:33] Even the people that I never thought would embrace or have that conversation are including it in some of their conversations moving forward, which is a huge step. So it's almost like an acknowledgement, like I can't ignore this. I have to have these conversations. So on the other hand, Mike, did you ever, even though they may have like put money towards it in your work, did you ever think that you would have large corporations caring about insects?

Speaker 5:
[10:07] No, definitely not. I will say right after I graduated from Delaware, I worked at a plant nursery in Seagirt, New Jersey called Marlowe's. And then when I finished my post-doc, like 11 years later, I went back and worked there. Kind of, we were coming out of COVID. And just in that decade, time span was amazing to me to see just how much more knowledge came about with the native plants back East. 2010, we didn't have a native plant section. 2026 now they have, they sell mostly native plants. And most customers that come and buy them. And then now with the insects and oil and gas, I'll never forget. My master's was all like database management. And then my PhD, I told my advisor, I wanted to get involved with actual ecology work. And one of the companies in the Jonah field of Wyoming, they gave me a grant and it said on it, they didn't want to influence my work or influence the data or the statistics or anything, that I just needed to tell them what sites I'd be on for safety reasons. And I'll never forget, I showed up with the sweet net and probably 100 Ziploc bags with a blue cooler and a red cooler. And in the morning, I thought the president of that company was going to choke me in the parking lot. He said, this is overspending money on for this university researcher. And then by the end of the day, I was looking at the red cooler was reference sites, blue cooler was our reclaim areas. I was looking at sites that we seeded just with grasses and then sites that we seeded with a bunch of native wildflowers. And I come back and the guy at 4.30 in the afternoon says, well, what did you find? I said, blue cooler is my reclaim and the red cooler is my reference. And he opened them. And there was probably about 100 bees in this cooler. And then there was nothing in the reference because it's just all old decadent sagebrush. And he said, wait a second. So you're quantifying that we're improving pollinator habitat. And the Bureau of Land Management is going to make us regulate pollinators. And he said, well, I really actually am trying to quantify if you have sage grouse food on your sites is what I'm really trying to do. And then he said right after that, like, that's the best $35,000 that we've spent. And then I've had four or five other companies now that I've worked with fallen suits. So it's kind of nice.

Speaker 3:
[12:29] I love that motivation that I know I've talked about in the podcast. I can't remember if I had talked about this the last time you were on. But we had done a project for a pipeline where they were going through and replanting. And it was a very large order for us where they were contract growing. It was like a half a million plugs. And I was like, you know, we're, we are going to have to ask for a 20 percent deposit before we start this. And he smiled and he pulled out a checkbook and he wrote the check for the entire amount. And just went, hey, just make sure my weeds are ready when I asked for them. And handed it over. But I'm sure research like you're doing would, would garner a different response from them. I'm sure the planting was such a small portion of that, that project budget. But the afterwards is what matters, you know, as far as doing that work. I see our third guest joined us. So not, not too late. Perfect timing, actually. Tim, you want to introduce yourself and tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Speaker 7:
[13:35] Sure. Yeah. My name is Tim Robinson. I'm a professor of statistics at the University of Wyoming. Also have appointment at the University of Washington and School of Medicine, the University of San Diego School of Medicine.

Speaker 3:
[13:50] And where are you joining us from today?

Speaker 7:
[13:52] Yeah. So I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand today.

Speaker 3:
[13:56] Good morning. I know it's a lot earlier for you than it is for us right now.

Speaker 4:
[14:03] Yeah. So Mike, realistically, this was your idea to have her on today. So why don't you set the stage of why you thought our three guests today were a good choice and some of the things that you want to talk about?

Speaker 5:
[14:20] Sure. Well, I've been in touch with Doug for pretty much since I graduated from Delaware. We've had some gaps, but I went to his talk at Monmouth University, I think, in 2023. And we have been in a lot closer contact since then. But he was a great mentor to me very early in my academic career. And then Tim really helped me throughout my PhD program as a statistics professor. And I thought it was interesting because I was actually working with a guy called Blair Robertson, who Tim is working with now. Blair is a professor at University of Canterbury. He was in Wyoming for a couple of semesters. I took sampling design and data mining with him. When he went back to New Zealand, I needed a new statistician and I looked up the stats department and saw Tim had just published a paper about horseshoe crab populations in the Delaware Bay, which I did a lot of video work when I was in undergrad and Delaware on. So I emailed Tim and then, yeah, we've been working together pretty much ever since. So I thought that connection, all three of us have some tie to Delaware, which I thought was kind of cool. And then obviously, yeah, Doug is like the godfather of Native Plants. So I think it was good to have him on here.

Speaker 3:
[15:44] I would love to hear more about the horseshoe crab research. Because as soon as I think that, I think of red knots. But I was curious what the nature of the research you were doing on populations.

Speaker 7:
[15:59] Yeah, so I was working with a, there's a guy, Dave Smith, that worked with USGS for a long time. He was in Lee Town in Virginia. And so we were just looking at sort of modeling the abundance of those horseshoe crabs. And when you think about that, like, how do you figure out how many horseshoe crabs are on a beach, right? So that's an interesting project. So yeah, you know, my I have some background in sampling design. And so I was working with Dave on coming up with a sampling design so that we have good estimates of what the abundance of those horseshoe crabs were in a certain area there in Delaware. And you're right, that's a fascinating story with the Red Knot. It's just one of those amazing stories of of this earth.

Speaker 5:
[16:49] Yeah, that's when I was doing video work, I worked with the company called 302 Stories out of Wilmington, Delaware. We were following horseshoe crabs and Red Knot's both the biology and the ecology of it, as well as kind of the socio and economical side of it. Horseshoe crabs are like the largest driver of the economy out of the Delaware Bay, mainly because of their blood. And yeah, that to me, what really helped me with working through that was the story with the sage grouse out here. All endangered species stories seem to be kind of similar. So yeah, it was neat to get that experience that early in my life or career.

Speaker 3:
[17:31] So what's driving a lot of your research right now, Mike? Where is the funding coming from? What is some of the research that you're working on currently?

Speaker 5:
[17:43] We should be putting out a paper this week about the insects in the sage-grouse diet. It's a big meta-analysis that was funded by the Wyoming Game and Fish. I have one client in the Powder River Basin. It's an oil and gas company where I'm looking at soil characteristics, above-ground biomass response, native vegetation response, and then we're also looking at insects, and we're probably going to add a little bit more wildlife component to that this summer. I have one client down in Colorado, a pipeline company where they allowed us to come up with a seed mix where we have islands across the pipeline, so they're actually stabilizing the soil in some spots, and then we're actually putting real diverse floral plants. We've been measuring that. This will be our third summer. And that's kind of cool. It's right on the Pouda River, and there's a bike path there, so it's sort of neat. When I'm working down there, you'll see people biking or walking or running or whatever, and they're always wondering what we're doing, sampling insects out there, and it seems like the general public gets kind of excited that there's actually companies that are intentionally trying to improve pollinator habitat and diversity. And then I'm doing some work up in the Pinedale-Anacline in northwest Wyoming, where Tim and I actually just published a paper on a big sampling design up there for that whole field. And then, yeah, we've done some insect work up there, and then a lot of that stuff is like compliance work and helping them improve seed mixes and things like that.

Speaker 3:
[19:22] Are you finding that there's more of this type of research to be done than you can handle? Like, I would imagine that over the last, say, 20 years, like... And Doug, I don't know how you feel about this. Do you feel that... Like, I kind of feel that a lot of this is maybe driven now from the awareness that you've helped create over the last 20 years with this kind of work. Do you see this gaining more momentum and esteem as you move forward?

Speaker 6:
[19:51] With practitioners, absolutely. I mean, you've even mentioned it. The demand for Native Plants now exceeds the supply. The interest, I just see the interest going straight up. I can measure it from the number of talk requests I get. You know, it used to be a couple. Then it was one a week. Then it's, you know, I get three or four requests a day sometimes, and there's no way I can match that. And it's just that people are very excited at this feeling of being empowered. They can actually change things. They can watch the change. And it's a direction of horticulture that real gardeners have taken. But even people who don't garden at all, they want to do something with their property. They want to hire somebody to do it. And it's spreading throughout the country. So that's been really rewarding in terms of, you know, funding for new scientific research and everything. You know, of course, NSF is in a terrible shape right now. Science is in a terrible shape. And this is not the time to be looking for big new federally funded projects. But private donors have stepped forward. They've actually funded the last two or three grad students that I've had. And that's going to carry me to the end because, yeah, I'm not applying for any more big grants or anything. But so it's been great. You know, there are a lot of people out there with a lot of money and a lot of them don't know what to do with it. So I've got some good ideas for them.

Speaker 3:
[21:25] And if you're good at convincing it, like I think of Dr. Dwayne Estes and how he's able to spread such a great message and get philanthropists to help do, you know, help him do the work that he's doing, it's so important. And you mentioned supply and demand like as a nursery, we've been in business for 40 years, 40 plus years. We're up like 43% in the last three years. And we just had someone visiting the nursery last week. And he's like, are you prepared? Like they're at a nursery that sells natives, but they're not a native plant nursery. And he goes, we've seen such an increase in demand. Are you prepared for how much more this is going to take off? And I was like, of course you already goes, no, you're not. Like I'm looking around, you have no material left to sell. Like you're running out of plant material, you need to do more and there needs to be more of us. Yes, we can do more, but there needs to be a lot more people that do what we do. That's why I was curious if you're hitting the point where you're feeling as if there needs to be a lot more people doing what you do. What do you think, Mike?

Speaker 6:
[22:30] Oh, Mike.

Speaker 5:
[22:31] I think one of the things that's helped me a lot, and this is pretty new, but most of these publicly traded companies need to put together what's called an ESG report, which is Environment, Social and Governance. Sometimes you'll see on their websites corporate sustainability. In the oil and gas world, a lot of companies, I think, have found it difficult because there's no real regulation on measuring stuff in the atmosphere. There's no standard tools to measure CO2 or methane. So you could have two people measure the same site with two different instruments, but it's been neat. I've had three or four clients now highlight the work that my company, Abnova, is doing in their sustainability reports. And it's, I think, a lot easier. I'm trying to pitch it as if we look from ecosystem function. We increase our native plant diversity. Then we're probably gonna increase our insect diversity. And that stuff's all way easier and way more black and white. I'm not talking in parts per million. I'm talking in bar graphs and pie charts. So that's been, I think, really helpful. And then I'm finding it's really kind of a copycat industry that some of these big companies, they've got people that all day long, their job is to do like market research. And they'll say, well, oh, shoot, if, you know, Company X just highlighted their pollinator work, then we should probably be getting on board if that's what investors are liking. So that's been really helpful to me. And then my pitch with that is you have to do reclamation anyway. So it doesn't cost you any, it usually costs you less over time to do it right off the gate. And yeah, so that's been what's really been, I think, driving a lot of my stuff. And then it's actually nice. One of my bigger clients, we've got two groups at the University of Wyoming now, the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, mainly that we're working with. So we've got a master's student, a postdoc, and three academic research professionals. And then Tim has helped with a lot of the stats on some of that stuff as well. So it's kind of neat to see industry funding the academic research, which I think is kind of what Doug was saying before, that these companies want to do it. And I think it looks good for them to partner with the university. So it's been nice.

Speaker 2:
[24:54] Stay tuned for more of the Native Plants Healthy Planet Podcast, presented by Pineland's Nursery.

Speaker 8:
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Speaker 2:
[25:35] Welcome back to the Native Plants Healthy Planet podcast, presented by Pined Lands Nursery.

Speaker 3:
[25:45] I'm sure some of our listeners are probably conflicted listening to this because they think big energy and they want them to not do some of the things that they're doing. But as you mentioned, like with science, not really having the funding, a lot of this funding is coming from the corporations they want to hate on, which I'm sure they're conflicted on hearing about.

Speaker 5:
[26:08] Right. Well, in Wyoming, what's nice, we just had either our 16th or 17th Annual Petroleum Association of Wyoming Wildlife and Reclamation Conference. I think I've missed the first one and then I've been to every other one of them since. Just in the last 15 or 16 years, the shift, there's been so much knowledge exchange, some people are getting so much better, people are really caring about it. I think a lot of it also has to do with the Endangered Species Act. We've got the sage-grouse and some other species, a lot of wildlife in Wyoming. So a lot of these companies are obligated to do a good job at reclamation. I think most of them are probably willing to go above and beyond if they can see the benefit of doing that. And then, yeah, that's the one thing I've just tried to look at is, you know, if we, maybe we spend a little bit more money up front, but if we're keeping weeds off of our sites and getting sites to their bond release or their meeting regulatory criteria faster, we're saving a lot of money in the long run and then having a nice impact on the native systems that are kind of around us.

Speaker 3:
[27:24] Tim, working with stats over the last couple of years with some of the research I've done, are you encouraged by some of the stats that you've seen or worried?

Speaker 7:
[27:35] Yeah, it's a great, great question. You know, I think that on the statistics front, when I get called in, a lot of the times the ways that I help people are figuring out how large should their study be.

Speaker 3:
[27:48] Okay.

Speaker 7:
[27:48] And helping people formulate a good research question. You know, I was involved with a project last year where there was interest in monitoring shorebirds, for instance. And, you know, I was trying to help them look at how much more sampling should we do. And so, you know, you're looking at this and one year you might observe, you know, a couple hundred birds on a beach. And then the next time they go back, and there might only be 50 birds. And then you go back and then there's 300 birds. And so they want to, and I said, well, what's your goal? They said, we want to estimate a, you know, per annum trend of 10 percent. Well, if you're observing 300 one day that you go out and 50, the next time you go out, you know, that's a wild swing. And so telling people about just basic things like, hey, we need to go more than once a year, you know, because just getting people thinking about how often should we go, how precisely can we measure things and counting things is difficult, right? I mean, that things just change. There's a lot of variation, uncertainty, if you will. And so helping people understand that idea of uncertainty, I think, it's been, it's rewarding when you see sampling designs, you know, improve by having people think statistically about that uncertainty. You know, here in New Zealand, their Department of Conservation have done a lot of work for them, and they require research projects that are funded. Every one of them has to have a sampling design plan, right? Well phrased questions, you know, and a solid sampling design. And, you know, and I think we can probably learn from that. We've been used to having a lot in our country, and so it's like, oh, I just want to go monitor something. So you just get people out in the field, they start counting things and measuring things. And there's been no sampling plan in place, right? So I think we can learn from places like New Zealand where they do require some of those things to be thought out before you just roll out into the field and start collecting data.

Speaker 3:
[29:45] I love that. And I would imagine it's hard to figure out, like I wasn't thinking that birds are something that can come and go from the site as well. I was thinking one of our past guests, Mike McGraw, who did work on the documentary Root So Deep and was doing bird surveys, just seeing some of those results in another format in regenerative farming is just... I just love the amount of work that's being done and the access to it. I don't know if a documentary like Root So Deep I would have seen 30 years ago, or if people would have cared 30 years ago. But when you look at the corporations that were funding that research, like McDonald's, if we can get a product that our customers feel better about, and we can prove that we're doing things better, then it's worth putting the money towards it. I just love seeing money get used that way. Because I can imagine that was not... Douglas, throughout your career, and all the research that you've done, is it easier to secure fund... I guess it depends on the type of research you're doing. Is it easier to secure corporate funding these days than it was, say, 30 years ago?

Speaker 6:
[31:04] Well, I never got any corporate funding 30 years ago. I also didn't try to though. You know, there's status associated with getting USDA or NSF funding. You're trying to get... 30 years ago, you're trying to get tenure. You're trying to... you want to brag, hey, I got an NSF grant. If I got a grant from Exxon, it wouldn't carry nearly as much money. As a matter of fact, then they'd be saying conflict of interest, you know what, as greenwashing. So it was very different back then.

Speaker 3:
[31:35] For all three of you, dream research. If you could have the funds appear to do any kind of research you want it. There's got to be like if you're thinking big, there's always one in your back pocket where you're like, if I could do this, I would love to be a part of this. Do the three of you have something on the tip of your tongues for that?

Speaker 6:
[32:01] Well, I can go first if you want.

Speaker 3:
[32:02] Yeah, I'd love to hear.

Speaker 6:
[32:03] You're asking about dream research at the very end of my career, and I'm not going to do it. We do have one final project, and we're doing it, and it doesn't require huge amounts of funding, but we have looked at the ability of certain plants to support the food web, and some are really good, and we call them keystone plants, and we've ranked those for every county in the country, and it's been a really important resource. We realized we need to do this for the whole world, because people are planting plants all over the world. There's the trillion tree project where they're going to help climate change by putting in a trillion trees. Well, if it's a trillion eucalyptus, they're really missing the boat. Which trees are the best trees? Which plants are the best plants to support the most biodiversity as you move from ecoregion to ecoregion around the world? That information is absent. It's not absent anymore. We actually have it on a huge Excel file right in our lab. But now getting it out and disseminating it and influencing conservation projects around the world would be our final step. You know, we're looking at hiring a postdoc right now to help get several papers out of this, but answer really important questions like what makes, why are some plants, keystone plants, and others not? Does that trend hold as you move down into the tropics? The answer is yes. But it's a little bit weaker because there's so much diversity down there. Lots of things like that. That will be my final research effort. Unfortunately, it doesn't require, you know, the $6 million to pull off.

Speaker 3:
[33:39] So I can't wait for that. I'm glad I asked that question. All right, Mike, you're on the hot seat. What's yours? Have you done research work outside of the Midwest? I know you're a Jersey boy, but.

Speaker 5:
[33:52] I was a research technician for Doug for three years at University of Delaware. And then I was yet we didn't get the funding, but we were working with Terry Doss's group on some stuff up in the Meadowlands there. And then, yeah, I think I did a postdoc at Mississippi State as well. So I worked in the Southeast for about a year. But more on like wildlife stuff. So the dream research, that insect meta-analysis in the sage grouse diet, I'm trying to get some funding to do something very similar to what Doug's talking about with the sagebrush step ecosystem. With my hope being that I could then go to clients and say, we can really be very prescriptive with our seed mixes and put more thought into enhancing the food web when we know what insects are out there. I do have one project that I hope the lab work gets started on this week. But for the last two summers, I was collecting sage grouse fecal pellets and putting them in these little two milliliter scientific tubes. We have a new DNA and genomic center at the University of Wyoming, but I'm hoping that if the analysis comes out the way I think it will, I should really get a better understanding of what exactly these birds are eating up in the Pine Daly Anticline. So I'm excited about that. Then I've been getting a lot until remote sensing work lately, so I'm excited about just moving forward with that. We're working with a couple of folks from the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database on that using drone imagery and melding it with satellite imagery and stuff like that to try to really reduce our field monitoring time. So right now those are my three things. I'm sure once I get done with them, that's a nice thing with research. I'll think of something else that I hope I want to do.

Speaker 3:
[36:02] Tim, how about you?

Speaker 7:
[36:04] Thanks a lot for the question. I agree you should always have something in your back pocket for when a question like this is asked. We have so many really cool, sexy modeling tools that are available. I think about like Bayesian hierarchical modeling and machine learning, and all these fantastic approaches to modeling. But what it requires is good data. We have information everywhere. So I think that for me, I've gotten, I guess through the years, much more interested in data science and on the side of integrating messy multi-scale data, right? That sort of the data fusion problem. So I think about an ecology, we've got satellite imagery, that remote sensing, that Mike just mentioned, genomic data, EDNA data, field surveys. When you think about the scales in which these different data sources are collected, they don't really line up real cleanly. I think that if I had a decent amount of funding, I'd love to be able to work on some of these information centers where the data is on lots of different scales. How can we integrate that information? How can we link remote sensing with ground truth data? Because if we can integrate that information in one spot, then we've got all the tools in the world to figure out really interesting relationships and be able to predict very complicated phenomena. But in order to be able to predict it and to do it well and with good precision, we've got to integrate that data, we've got to be able to clean it. So I think just in that data science realm, that would be what I'd like to focus on.

Speaker 3:
[37:54] That leads into my next question pretty well actually, because I was going to say, given those dream projects, let's say you're working on them right now, how does climate change affect those projects or what you're doing right now? How is putting a database together for keystone species throughout the world, how does climate change affect that data moving forward?

Speaker 6:
[38:24] Well, climate change is one of the major drivers of insect decline. The data that's coming in now are saying that it's not, we talk about global insect decline, it's not an even decline of insects around the globe no matter what. It's highly correlated with drought, which is a climate change issue. So wherever you're having less rain than you're used to, the insects are getting clobbered, the plants are getting clobbered. A lot of people think about climate change in terms of assisted migration. Well, we'll just take plants from the south and plant them up north. It's not nearly that simple. A lot of people think if the plant survives, that's the only goal. Well, we want the plant to survive in its ecological context. So you're not moving the whole ecosystem up with the plant, you're moving a single plant and all the things that interact with it are going to stay behind, which means if it does survive, it's not going to be performing the roles that it normally should. The interesting work by, again, Desiree Narango looking at pollinator plants. I just heard her paper yesterday. She's got populations of plants from North Carolina, populations of plants from Ohio, and populations of plants from Vermont. She's growing them all in a common garden to see how the specialist pollinators that interact with these plants, what their geographic origin does to that specialization. The end result, just to take a long story and make it short, is that it's only the plants that are where they co-evolve with the local pollinators that are actually serving them. The other ones are blooming too early or too late, and they're out of sync. So that's what's going to happen. We also have polar vortex, vortices happening every single winter. It snowed in Florida this year. It snowed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana last year. They got 9 inches of snow. It got down to 9 degrees. When you start moving southern plants up, they don't survive that. I've got ornamental plants from neighbors down the street that totally brown now because we had a normal winter this year, and it killed them. So, yeah, we need to rely on the genetic variability that is inherent in plants and hope that they can adapt to us. But what we really need to do, we're putting all our effort into trying to, I don't know, try to survive the climate change that's happening. Let's address climate change itself. We're not going to stop it, but we've got to minimize. We really can reduce the amount of carbon that's going up there. Putting those trees back, a third of the carbon that's in the atmosphere now has come from the trees we've chopped down on this planet. Put the trees back. We can pull a third out. There's a lot of things we can do to make the impact that we're feeling right now less over time. Denying that it exists is not one of them. It's not going to do it.

Speaker 4:
[41:32] Yeah. I just read something and I don't remember who posted it. It was on social media. It may have been Rebecca McMackin, but it was going back 50 years. There wasn't a lot of, I guess, climate change denial happening. It was kind of, I think even further than that, there wasn't a lot of denial. It was kind of, it seemed like most people are on the same page that it was happening. It was, well, what do we do about it? And that's where the conflict was, where people were arguing. Or if it was something to worry about. And now there's the denial, like you mentioned, Doug.

Speaker 6:
[42:10] Well, it became politicized. I mean, that was the issue. It moved from science to politics and that was the end of that.

Speaker 4:
[42:16] Yeah. But taking a step back into something else you said with the research about plants in different locations is, it's something that I think has made sense to most people for a long time. But I'm glad that there's research being done on that. And I know in some of our old presentations, it was things we brought up, having local provenance plants, planting stuff from a local eco type would result in more project success. But when I really dug into it, it was hard to find concrete evidence that that was truly the case. Like I said, it made a lot of sense. So I'm just seeing that when it comes out just because it's, like Fran had mentioned before as well, as native plants become more popular and general horticulture and these bigger nurseries are paying attention and starting to grow more of those, that's not always necessarily one of the things that they're taking into consideration. They're going through their normal supply chain saying, well, I always buy from this grower in Florida for grasses. So I'm going to get native grasses from them too and bring them up. And who knows where the seed came from. The one Fran was referencing in particular is paying attention and actually said, you know what, we're not even getting, yeah, we're selling more of the cultivars too, but we're getting more requests for the straight species we just want. And then local ecotype is starting to become something that they're hearing more and more of. So it is resonating with them, but maybe not at the right levels. There is a question buried in there somewhere, but I don't remember what it was.

Speaker 3:
[43:50] Well, I actually wanted to just to go back because Doug said something before we started recording about, without getting the snow you're supposed to get, it hurts the insects. Can you talk about that for a second, since we're talking about climate change?

Speaker 6:
[44:05] Right. Well, I was at a conference yesterday and I mentioned, oh, you folks in New England really must have hurt the plants and the insects as it was so cold this year, particularly the soil community. And the answer was no, actually it was easier on them. They measured soil temperature beneath the snow and it was warmer this year than it was last year when they didn't have any snow. And of course, that makes sense because the bitter cold is right there on the surface with no insulating blanket. The snow is an insulator. If you go deep enough, the soil is 50 degrees and that heat radiates up and the snow captures it. So snow cover is really important. There are long-term studies of ground beetles at Harvard Forest and other places and in recent decades, they've really tumbled and the reason they think is because of the lack of snow cover. What used to preserve their habitat during the winter has become, it's gone and it's been much harder for them to make it through the winter. So snow is good.

Speaker 3:
[45:08] Especially if you're in an area that's supposed to get it.

Speaker 6:
[45:11] That's supposed to get it, that's right. Not so good in Florida.

Speaker 3:
[45:16] So Mike and Tim, how does climate change affect the research that you mentioned? But I'll throw an extra part in that. How does AI affect it as well?

Speaker 5:
[45:28] Do you want to go first, Tim, or do you want me to go?

Speaker 7:
[45:31] I can hop in. So there's a double-barreled question there. AI and climate change. So as I was mentioned about data sources, we have lots of great climate data, and I think it's just trying to stitch that information together with other data, that are boots on the ground, data where we're observing species, we're observing whether it's plants, animals, whatever. Even going back to the point about, well, people didn't used to widely sort of, yeah, the climate is changing, they agreed. I agree, Tom, that that was sort of, and then it became politicized, and then it's like, oh, now all of a sudden, we don't even agree that the climate is changing, right? So, but I think that one of the keys on the political front, it seems, is we've got to, I feel like we're driven by sound bites, right? We're not, you know, bring data, bring evidence, and I think even science has been scared of evidence. I think we can't be scared of evidence. Let's let the evidence play out. Let's, we may have, excuse me. Maybe Mike, go ahead. Sorry.

Speaker 3:
[46:46] No worries.

Speaker 5:
[46:47] We're good. I'll just say here in Wyoming anyway, one thing I've noticed over the last several years, we've always had crazy temperature swings in Wyoming. That's just normal. But it seems like we're getting more moisture in the form of rain and snow, and it's happening later in the year. One of the challenges, similar to what Doug was saying, we're almost always using seeds rather than container plants when we're restoring these pipelines and well pads. It was mentioned earlier that we don't necessarily have the native seed supply to fit the demand that we have. So that's something I've been really trying to work on with my clients is being careful about seed mix selection, and sometimes until pretty recently, I don't think people really looked at that. It was just like what Doug was saying, a yarrow is a yarrow, it doesn't matter where it comes from. So we've been working to try to get some of that stuff more localized. Then putting seed mixes together is interesting because gosh, I was in the Pine Daly and the Klein, I guess it was two summers ago. The seed mix from nine years prior had Mexican hat, or that's retibita column neforia. I'd never seen that grow once when we got these late August rains and it just popped up everywhere. So I think some of that is just is bet hedging and making our seed mixes diverse enough that they're going to, yeah, some stuff will grow in dry years, and some will grow in wet years, and some will grow in warm years, and some will grow in cold years, I guess. Then yeah, my buddy Taylor Crowe, he's actually a plant geneticist. He works for a company called Sun World Now. He did his PhD on mountain mahogany out here in Laramie, Wyoming in a limestone quarry. And he did a lot of the real original work on provisional seed zones and seed transfer guidelines. And it was kind of interesting what he found. We're at like 7,200 feet in Laramie. He was seeing more success getting a mountain mahogany plant from 8,000 feet in New Mexico, then at 5,200 feet in Denver, even though Denver's only two hours from us and what not. That was like just ecological differences. So yeah, and then I think it'll be interesting to see what Desiree's work shows up with that Doug was just talking about because it might not be good even if we can get the thing to grow. If it's not supporting ecosystem functionality, then yeah, so we got a lot of issues I think going on. And yeah, I think we do need definitely to get more native seeds and local seeds.

Speaker 6:
[49:44] Fran, can I jump in with just a little anecdote that doesn't relate to much of anything but it was fun. I was in Michigan recently and a guy is restoring 30 acres and great pictures and the first thing he did was to try to dig out some of the prairie potholes that had been buried a hundred years ago so they could farm it and he's done a few and what he did was he just dug them out with a backhoe and piled the soil up around them and then he walked away. The interesting part of the story is what germinated that had been in that seed bank for a hundred years. Cardinal flower, all these Native Plants from the original prairie were coming up after being underground for a hundred years. That just speaks to the resiliency of nature that I just thought it was really cool.

Speaker 3:
[50:31] I love that. I attended a conference probably 15 years ago and they were talking about dam removal in Pennsylvania and they had said how a farmer had moved the fluvial pattern of the stream to put a dam in. When they took it out and moved it back, the original seed bank all came up and they knew had been there well over a hundred years. They're like, we didn't even have to plant this. It just came back and that speaks for resiliency. The other thing I was thinking about with climate change, and I'm going to let Tim finish his thought, I also thought we had a guest on from Glacier National Park and they were talking about whitebark pine. What was devastating them was actually a native insect that just typically couldn't survive there because it was too cold. The cold would kill them. Now, with the change in weather, that insect can survive the winter and that's what's decimating it. So it's even like you have like they're like, we can't really do anything about it because this is just nature doing its work.

Speaker 6:
[51:37] Can I challenge that?

Speaker 3:
[51:38] Yeah, I would love to hear that. I would love that.

Speaker 6:
[51:41] I hear that story all the time and you're really talking about a few degrees.

Speaker 3:
[51:45] Okay.

Speaker 6:
[51:46] As if a few degrees colder is going to kill the pine peel. Nah, the insects are really what kills insects is desiccation for the most part. They're even really good at handling heat, but heat without water is what's killing them. What the mountain pine beetle and all the beetle problems in the West, I think, and a lot of other people think too, it's a result of us suppressing fire for 100 years. What's happened is it used to be uneven-aged forest. They're now all totally mature trees. It's exactly what those pine beetles want. We've taken a resource that was here and there in terms of old trees and replaced it with solid old-growth trees, and the pine beetles go nuts. We've given them unlimited resource, and that's what's clobbering our trees. You say, we can't do anything about it. We can do something about it. We can return fire management. We can get some uneven-aged forests, and fix what we messed up over the last 150 years.

Speaker 3:
[52:50] If only Emil De Vito was on this call too, about growing season birds and the pine barrens. We would be having a very good conversation about that.

Speaker 5:
[53:02] Yeah, one of the things kind of piggybacking on what Doug was just saying, we have a big pine bark beetle problem just outside of Laramie and the Snowy Range Mountains about 25, 30 miles out of here. And one of the issues now, because we had suppressed fires for so long, we now have these big stands of dead trees. So our fires are coming in more higher intensity. That's an issue that we're dealing with because a high enough intense fire out here can sterilize the soil to some degree, or at least push it back. And then another issue we've been running into with fires, there was a couple big ones the last two summers. I was actually out working one day and saw the lightning strike that caused this thing. The next day, it was 52,000 acres of sagebrush burned. It was actually really sad because I knew the landowners that were up there, but cheatgrass, which is one of our biggest problems as an invasive out here, that does well. It comes back faster after fire than a lot of our natives. So that, yeah, we've run into some invasive weed issues related to fire management. And then even just selecting seed mixes, that's something I'm really trying to drive home. You can have a certified weed free seed, but it can still have up to a couple of percentage of cheatgrass or actual weeds. So we just did a series of white papers from practitioners in Wyoming. One of the guys in the field says, if he sees any percentage of cheatgrass, it's cheaper for him to just leave that native plant out of a seed mix because dealing with an introduced weed by accident is a major problem. So yeah, that's something else I think we're dealing with a lot out, at least in the Western United States.

Speaker 3:
[54:55] I mean, I think about just that it's not because of fire, but on the nursery property, Tom and his brother were working on quail habitat and did some daylighting, which is something that fire would have done, but the amount of the spring ephemerals that showed up after that daylighting, that weren't there prior, was pretty amazing. Like how long do you think that has been suppressed? No one's probably touched those woods and...

Speaker 4:
[55:21] Oh, yeah. Well, basically, once they stopped farming it, and it just was allowed to grow back up, it was all sweet gum and red maple, well, primarily. There's a couple hickories in there, some black walnut. So, yeah, and then then there's no understory from deer browse. Yeah, it's very typical of the Atlantic and Northeast.

Speaker 2:
[55:46] Stay tuned for more of the Native Plants Healthy Planet podcast, presented by Pinelands Nursery.

Speaker 8:
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Speaker 2:
[56:28] Welcome back to the Native Plants Healthy Planet podcast, presented by Pined Lands Nursery.

Speaker 3:
[56:38] Tim, did you want to finish your thought about AI and climate change? Sorry, I know we got way off the top.

Speaker 7:
[56:44] Yeah, no problem. Sorry for that. I got you in my throat there. Just going back with climate change and the idea of that being politicized, I think that we have to remember, we have to think very carefully about how we message and who is doing the messaging on things like climate change. I think we did a study back right after COVID and we were wondering, why are people not believing some of the science about COVID? When we looked at that and we were like, well, who are people that are trusted to deliver the message about should you be vaccinated, not vaccinated, that sort of thing. And it wasn't government officials and it was not universities. The people that were trusted were nurses, right? Your local nurse, your local physician, that's who were trusted. So you get the message out from people that are trusted. And a lot of times I think we think we're academics so therefore people should trust us. Actually, that's not the case at all. I think we actually people don't trust us, right? And so I think that we need to really, I don't know, just stand in the mirror and say, okay, well, how do we get this message out where people are going to trust the message and we're going to build it based on data? Go to the AI question. Let me just briefly touch on that. I mentioned all these disparate data sources and trying to stitch those together. That can be three or four years ago, that was a very daunting task. And now, generative AI is so helpful for providing strategies about how to use stitch together data sources. It used to be you'd have to have a course on Python or a course on, multiple course on Python about how to stitch data together. But now, you can get that. I mean, generative AI is fantastic for that, about helping us figure out how to stitch that data together. So anyway, those are just quick thoughts. I know we're towards the end of the program here.

Speaker 3:
[58:41] Just one, I'm going to sidetrack it one more time, thinking about who should be trusted. Tom and I have had this conversation. Being in the business, in the Native Plant business for over 40 years, it's a very low percentage of our customer base that cares about local ecotype, which is what we do. 95% of the plants we grow is from seed that we collect ourselves locally. I'd say our average customer probably doesn't care. It's nice, but it's not a driver of the... Now, the municipalities care, the cities care, the engineer and the architect who's requesting it cares. But sometimes it's the contractor that's the lowest bid that ends up carrying this out, that really doesn't care. I was curious how that affects your research or some of your work. I'm going to try to say this as generically as possible. We had one of our customers was working on a project where someone was supposed to go in and forestry mulch around the perimeter of a 40-acre wood. They were supposed to spray the invasives, forestry mulch, and then put a fence up. Well they went out to check on him and he had forestry mulch the entire 40 acres of understory and he didn't understand why it was a problem. He's like, well, I don't even know what I'm supposed to spray now. And they're like, well, it was all the stuff that's going to sucker now because you didn't spray it beforehand and he begrudgingly replanted. But that's the kind of stuff that we see or a contractor that's doing acres of salt marsh and they plant patents in the tidal zone and alternative floor and the high marsh and the whole project's a failure. We see that. How does that, when you have the people that you're supposed to trust, how do some of those things factor into the work that you're doing? It's just something that happens and I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus, but are you seeing less of that? Is that less of an issue? Do you see that changing over the next 10 years?

Speaker 6:
[60:49] You know, part of the problem is we're really talking about restoration. We're talking about invasive species control. We're talking about things that have, they're young. You know, these are issues that have just come upon us in the last 15, 20 years. And we're doing the best we can, but we make a lot of mistakes. So it's lack of education. It's not that, you know, everybody's stupid. It's just we haven't, we haven't, we don't have the practical hands-on knowledge to make it work every time. But I think we're moving in that direction. I know we're moving in that direction. More and more people are getting good at it. So I think it's a feature of where we are in this transition rather than that it's impossible to do.

Speaker 3:
[61:37] Mike or Tim, do you have anything to add to that?

Speaker 7:
[61:39] Yeah. I agree that this is young. And I think that one of the issues that we run into on funding is that there's these funding cycles that are so rigid that the money has to be spent in the fiscal year. And if it's a use it or lose it. And then people say, oh, well, when it gets to the end of the year, I spend like a drunken sailor. Well, that's not how we should be approaching things. So it seems like some very... Why does it have to be that way? It doesn't have to be so rigid, right? So I think that that would help, right? Because if you bring that timeline, bridge that, take that timeline, expand it some, then you have the time to educate people. And you go through, hey, how should this dissemination of mulch go about? You're not on such a strict timeline. Anyway, that's just one thought.

Speaker 5:
[62:32] One thing I'll say that I've noticed in the reclamation or restoration realm, I think it's important for us as researchers and practitioners to also be willing to admit when we're wrong. I've seen that happen. I haven't made the best seed mix, every seed mix that I've ever made. But I've certainly seen folks that you come up with a good idea or you've got some grant and it's so this is the best idea and it's the only idea. At some point, it's like we got to just look back and say, hey, maybe there's other ideas and we can learn and improve. But I think that that happens maybe a little too often or people just get caught up with there's only one way to do it and what not.

Speaker 3:
[63:17] It's difficult because we're in a day and age where everyone has an opinion and they can tell it to you. What I appreciate about the three of you is when you give me an answer, I know the signs behind what you're explaining to me or where you got that information from. But there's so many voices out there that I don't trust the message or I don't know where they got the information or they heard it. We're guilty sometimes. We hear so much stuff and sometimes we're just trying to make sure we're not giving bad information or not just passing on rumors. It's difficult because my memory is starting to blur where I got this information from or how. Did I actually read it or did someone tell it to me? I don't know.

Speaker 4:
[64:01] I think a lot of it's well-intentioned. Sometimes it's taken out of context. I'm just reminded of my son telling me Saturday how he saw some kind of bumblebee feeding on a flower and said, oh yeah, bees help the flowers because they help them grow. Where did you hear that? That's not really exactly how it works. The premise is somewhat correct, but there's a lot more steps in there. Realistically, I might not even explain it perfectly to him. But yeah, I think a lot of it's well-intentioned, it's not always there.

Speaker 5:
[64:44] One other thing I've noticed, and I think a reason I've always really liked working with Doug and Tim, is that they can deliver complex messages simplistically. That's been something I've been really trying to work on when I'm talking and stuff like that, is you give the same data set in front of an academic audience, and you may be over-complicating the statistics, where talking to practitioners, it's kind of being able to talk on their level, knowing that not every person has a PhD in statistics. And Tim did a really nice job to Petroleum Association, Wyoming Reclamation Conferences ago, just talking about sampling design, but keeping it so you didn't have to have a PhD in stats. And then I think sometimes, yeah, I've run into that problem myself trying to communicate to my audience where something because we've studied it so long, it's hard sometimes to not overcomplicate things. So I think that there's that too, that I think all of us can work on as academics, as making sure our audience can understand things. And then also listening to practitioners. I think that white paper study I was talking about earlier, it comes from people that have actually been running track, I think it's from people that have actually been doing the boots on the ground work, which you don't read in some of those than I probably did in, you know, my Reclamation 4000 class in graduate school. So, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[66:19] I know a hard thing to do is make someone care. All three of you do a really good job at that. Sorry, Doug, I didn't mean to cut you off.

Speaker 6:
[66:26] Well, talking simplified is easy for me because I have to explain it in a way that I understand it. But then it's done.

Speaker 7:
[66:36] Such a great point that Mike brings up. We did this recently comparing the bedside manner of chatbots to physicians. It was interesting how the chatbots did really, really well as far as their bedside manner. It's the reading level was approximately about a sixth grade reading level. Speaking in that level, I think we do need to think about, it's not that everybody's at a sixth grade reading level, it's just we're really busy, right? We want things explained simply, and we want to have an intuition about things. I think that that's such a great point, Mike, is to really think about the level that we're pitching something. Like Doug said, I need to have it at a sixth grade level just so I can understand it.

Speaker 3:
[67:22] Tom, were you going to say something?

Speaker 4:
[67:23] I have a question that came up on our buzz episode last week where it's just Fran and I and you guys are uniquely qualified to answer this question as a group. We were going back and forth on, there's a lot of native plant sales happening across the country right now and we kind of questioned how the fervor around native plants is growing probably at different rates across the country. There may be parts of the country, Wyoming in particular, that may not just because the population isn't there, to be as excited about native plants. We were going back and forth saying, I bet that there's a native plant sale within a five-hour drive where you live or then four-hour three. I think we got down to three hours.

Speaker 3:
[68:09] That we felt confident.

Speaker 4:
[68:11] I guess with the three of you, in your opinion, do you think that's the case? Wyoming was the state that came to mind as like there's not a super dense population or there are the urban centers that are really where I've kind of generalizing and saying that's where you're seeing more of a fervor around native plants. What do you guys think about that?

Speaker 6:
[68:36] There's some native plant deserts out there. Southern Virginia is one of them, or at least it was just a few years ago. The deep south is not leading the way. That's the only place I get pushback from Master Gardeners. They want it to be the old way. I heard West Virginia. So there are places where there's not enough people to support a viable business and it just hasn't developed.

Speaker 5:
[69:00] So I would say in Wyoming, definitely among the industry that are doing seeding at large scale, Native Plants are definitely trending in the right direction. I remember, I don't remember what year it was. It was probably 2012 or 2013. There was a conference called Earth Perfect down in Delaware that Doug was a keynote at. But some students from University of Wyoming and I went out to it. We stayed in New Jersey on our way to Delaware and they just couldn't believe the amount of money that people sink into landscaping back east, which out here, it's just not that people don't have nice lawns and stuff. It's just not like a multi-million dollar industry, horticulture sales out here. People are a lot more simplistic and we have more of that kind of scrubby sagebrush step type of like native jarge anyway. But I don't know anybody that goes and spends $3,000 at their local plant nursery just to have their garden ready before Memorial Day.

Speaker 6:
[70:11] Well, the perfect yard is a status symbol. So we're a little more deeply embedded in our status than you guys are. You have different status symbols. Maybe in Wyoming, the number of guns you have in the back of your truck there, I don't know. So I think that's the difference.

Speaker 3:
[70:29] How about you, Tim? Do you have anything to add?

Speaker 7:
[70:33] No, I was just thinking about that three or four hours in Wyoming. It depends on if it snowed that weekend or if it snowed any month of the year.

Speaker 3:
[70:43] One last thought before we ask the last question, just for the sake of time, I'm looking at the time. Is there an opportunity for the three of you to work together in the future? Is there anything in the works that you'll be doing together?

Speaker 5:
[70:57] I've been working with Tim since 2015, and I think we have a few projects coming up. And then, yeah, I was really excited. Doug was telling me about his upcoming book on Nature's Resilience. And, yeah, he said he's hoping to ask me some questions about some of the stuff going on out here, so I hope so.

Speaker 6:
[71:17] I'm watching Mike single-handedly save the West, and it's a great story. And I do want to write about that. So that that ought to be coming up in the next year.

Speaker 3:
[71:27] Oh, looking forward to it. You heard it here first. Or not. You heard it here. All right. So the last question, it's always the same on 313 episodes. We always ask our guests the same last question even if they've been on before. And it's a simple question, but a hard question. And that is, what is your favorite native plant? Doug, we're going to start with you to see if you've changed your mind since six years ago when you were on the first time.

Speaker 6:
[71:56] Yeah, probably not. But I'm going to expand it a little bit. I bet I said white oak.

Speaker 3:
[72:00] I think you did.

Speaker 6:
[72:01] And I'll say it again, except I have a really growing appreciation for anything in the genus Enothera, or Enothero, or however you want to pronounce it. The evening primroses, I mean, they're found from coast to coast. Really productive plant, beautiful. Just one of many. You know why the deer eat it all off my property, so I'm working hard to protect it. But it's a very cool plant.

Speaker 3:
[72:26] This is the first year mine did not come back. They did not come back this year. But I have a feeling it is deer related. Because they're by my...

Speaker 6:
[72:33] Well, it's a biennial, so you might have those seedlings going to germinate this year, and it'll be back next year.

Speaker 3:
[72:40] They're right by my front door, and I keep catching deer on my ring camera right there. So, fantastic choice. I'm trying to think of how many other people have said, how many other people have been influenced by you that have said their favorite plant was Native Plant was White Oak. It's been a lot over the six years. I think the one person I can remember that said White Oak, and it wasn't under the influence of Stanley Temple.

Speaker 9:
[73:10] Oh, really?

Speaker 3:
[73:11] Yeah, because he was mentioning just about this particular White Oak on his property and why. But Mike Curran, what is your favorite neighbor?

Speaker 5:
[73:23] Rocky Mountain Bee Plant is still my logo. So I'd say, at least in the Western United States, I like that plant a lot. It's been really nice as an early successional plant to, yeah, it does really well competing with some of our invasive weeds, and then it does really well capturing moisture and reducing evapotranspiration, allowing for other perennial species to come in. So I'll stick with Rocky Mountain Bee Plant until my logo changes.

Speaker 3:
[73:52] Do you have a favorite New Jersey native plant?

Speaker 5:
[73:57] I'm probably biased with some of the work I did with Doug Oakes, but I also like native maples a lot. I just really like the way that they look. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[74:06] I feel bad for Tim because you two had an unfair advantage. Typically, we send questions out in advance and we didn't, and Tim had no idea this question was coming. So if you're unprepared, that's fine. If you have one that you want to throw out, that would be wonderful.

Speaker 7:
[74:21] Absolutely. I think a big sagebrush for me is my favorite native plant. There's nothing better than a long drive across great distances in Wyoming. Big sagebrush, you see that out on the prairie. You get out there though and you walk around, you're antelope hunting or elk hunting or something, and you're right in that habitat, you see all of the ecosystem that's just right there, but you never see driving by, right, that the big sagebrush supports. And so, in the deep roots, that, I mean, it's unbelievable, the root system for big sagebrush. You hike down in ravines and you're like, well, what is this sticking out of the side of this hill, and 75 feet up is a big sagebrush plant. It's like, wow, I had no idea the root structure was that big. So anyway, I could go on and on, but you got to get out to Wyoming and walk around the prairie and look at that big sagebrush.

Speaker 3:
[75:19] We keep promising Mike we're going to do that. He keeps inviting us, and we keep telling him we're going to do it. We are going to do it. I promise. So for the last segment, which is just final thoughts, Tom and I take a turn at this as well, but this is where we take the opportunity. We hand you the floor. You can summarize, promote something, mention something we didn't mention, but we kind of give you the floor. So Tim, we'll work in reverse. We'll start with you this time.

Speaker 7:
[75:48] Maybe, yeah, I'm not real sure. So you're saying you're giving me the floor to do...

Speaker 3:
[75:53] Whatever you want. You can summarize, promote something, just the microphone is yours to say whatever you want to say.

Speaker 7:
[76:01] I see. Okay. Well, thanks for that. Yeah, I would say promotion wise, the University of Wyoming, I'm very grateful for the opportunity to have worked there my whole career. I'm grateful for the flexibility that they allow for me to get into with research. As far as promoting, there's so much information out there. We need to be able to stitch that information together. Data science is a big thing and we stitch that together from disparate sources and we can answer very complicated questions. I think there's so much potential with AI to do that. I think that we need to invest in squeezing the orange, get the juice out where we can actually make solid conclusions and then think about how we're going to communicate that and communicate it on a sixth-grade level so that we can advance science. Anyway, I guess those are just thoughts on the top of my head. I was not very well prepared to answer that, but that's just my thoughts.

Speaker 3:
[77:07] You were at the biggest disadvantage, but that was fantastic. Thank you very, very much. Mike, how about you?

Speaker 5:
[77:15] No, just thank you guys for having me on. I really want to say thanks to Doug and Tim also for just being great mentors and great research collaborators over the course of my young career. Yeah, I appreciate what you guys are doing, just promoting Native Plants. I think you guys are getting a lot of listeners and helping get the word out. Thank you guys.

Speaker 3:
[77:37] Thank you. I still can't believe people listen, but it's because of people like the three of you. Doug, how about you?

Speaker 6:
[77:45] Well, I can't pass up an opportunity to plug Homegrown National Park, whose mission is to, whose vision really is to have ecologically functional landscapes become the default. It's not going to be the exception, it's going to be the default. Everybody's doing that. If you want to change that, that's up to you, but it's going to be the default. That's the vision and that's what we're trying to promote at Homegrown National Park.

Speaker 3:
[78:10] Awesome. Tom, you want to go? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[78:12] I would say thanks to Mike for really setting this all up for us. Last week we were saying, well, we don't know who we have on next. And then Mike just happened to pop in our emails with a great suggestion. So we're glad this worked out.

Speaker 3:
[78:27] I just want to say how thankful I am. Every now and then, we've been doing this for six years, and every now and then, it starts to feel a little not fresh, you know? And then something reinvigorates us, and it's conversations like this. I could never do what the three of you do, but I'm thankful that I get the opportunity to talk to all of you and have people get to hear our conversations. And if we're a conduit to get your bigger message out, I'm happy to be a part in that way. Because I didn't really share anything that makes a difference, but I got to hear really cool things from the three of you that our listeners will get to experience as well. And if we get 10 more people to think the way that we all think today, then I just couldn't be more grateful to be a part of that in some way. So thank you to all three of you. We appreciate that.

Speaker 7:
[79:26] Thank you for the opportunity.

Speaker 4:
[79:28] Well, that's going to wrap us up today. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed listening to Doug, Mike, and Tim.

Speaker 3:
[79:34] I'll put links for everyone.

Speaker 4:
[79:35] We're going to have links in the show notes for all the places that you should go to look up more about them. We appreciate you joining us for another episode of Native Plants Healthy Planet presented by Pylons Nursery.

Speaker 3:
[79:46] Thank you to the Egocentric Plastic Men for contributing our theme music. Make sure you stream or buy their music wherever you consume music. You can follow us on all the major social medias. I'll have those links in the show notes as well as the number to our question and comment line, which is 215-3466-189, where you get to call in and ask a question or leave a comment. We'll do our best to play it on a future episode of The Buzz. And we say we'll do our best because we've had some calls that we can't play.

Speaker 4:
[80:16] I didn't know about this, Fran. I hadn't heard those.

Speaker 3:
[80:21] And I want to say thank you to all the members of our Native Plants Healthy Planet Facebook group for being such a wonderful community. I'm just thankful. I was looking at it today, just thinking how blessed we are for that.

Speaker 4:
[80:32] We appreciate you listening wherever you're listening, whether it's iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, really wherever. If you haven't already, hit subscribe and leave a review. Those go a long way into helping us rise up these podcast charts and have more people stumble across these conversations like what you just listened to. So with that, thank you everyone. I'm Tom.

Speaker 3:
[80:50] And I am Fran. Coming up next week, we have a buzz. Make sure you tune in and until then, keep it Native.

Speaker 2:
[82:15] Thank you for listening to the Native Plants Healthy Planet Podcast, presented by Pinelands Nursery. Remember to like, share, follow, and comment.

Speaker 10:
[82:26] This is Doc from Hiker Trash Radio, a human interest podcast with dirtbags. Stories from the backcountry are interesting, but sometimes the backstories of our guests are even better. So whether you are aspiring or bona fide hiker trash, settle in, buckle up, and listen to some questionable life choices.

Speaker 11:
[82:45] What do you do if you see a bear? Very important, but you can't get to the running into a bear part without the quitting the job and maybe selling the house or all those steps that come before.

Speaker 12:
[82:57] Pretty much turned me into an adult, gave me an immense amount of confidence and independence. That's what thru hiking can give you.

Speaker 9:
[83:05] I actually got hit on a rock slide at 13,000 feet for about five seconds. I thought I was gone and I'm like, no, this is not how it's supposed to end.

Speaker 13:
[83:14] Eventually, my foot gets caught on a rock and now I'm submerged underneath water and I'm stuck. There was a calm thought in my head of, nice try bud.

Speaker 10:
[83:22] I'm Doc and this is Hacker Trash Radio.

Speaker 14:
[83:27] If you like the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.