Stephen Thomforde

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    • Summary of Research
      • Emergence of Grazing Ecosystems
      • Grazing and Biodiversity
      • Grazing and Environmental Impacts
      • Pasture Management for Productivity and Environmental Attributes
      • Policy, Programs and Research Needs
  • Planning a better future
    • Creating a Unified Pollinator Ecology
      • Pollinators Are Grazers
      • The Grazing Lawn
      • Cool season species
      • Increase graminoid diversity
      • Functional groups, niche theory
      • Revise Current Genotype Restriction
      • High Density Patch Planting
      • Nitrogen Pollution Issues
      • Hay Instead of Chemicals
      • More Frequent Burnings
      • Afforestation
      • Conclusion: Creating Unified Pollinator Ecology
      • Stay Current: Resources
    • Grazing lawns as a model for urban lawns
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Conclusion: Creating Unified Pollinator Ecology

Restoring pollinator habitat requires us to focus our attention towards the pollinators. However, focusing only on the pollinator fails to capture the context in which the pollinators exist. We need to simultaneously focus on the both the foreground and background, at the same time, which is very difficult, and even impossible. It’s similar to the wave particle duality, where we can know light as either a wave or a particle, but not both at the same time. Instead we can only know light waves and photon particles at dovetails, such as in the photoreceptors in chlorophyll or the bending of light through a crystalline snowflake or around a planet in space.

It’s the same with ecology, across multiple criteria and scales in time and space, we cannot know pollinators as an organism and an ecosystem at the same time, but we can observe the dovetails, how the ecosystem impacts the pollinator and the pollinator impacts the ecosystem. It is the feedbacks between these types of ecology from which we can develop rich descriptions to better understand non-linear behaviors across different scales in time and space.

Mowing: With proper timing, mowing can achieve high native forb densities on light well drained soils, but will have little impact on heavy poorly drained soils where nitrogen trumps sunlight competition.

In This Series

A Plan For A Better Future: Creating a Unified Pollinator Ecology
Premise 1: Pollinators are grazers
Narrative 2: The most powerful terrestrial ecosystem on earth, the Grazing Lawn
Premise 3: Cool season species are cool too
Premise 4: Decrease grass seeding rates, but increase graminoid diversity
Premise 5: Functional groups, niche theory, and seed mix design
Premise 6: Relax the current punitive genotype restrictions
Premise 7: High density patch planting
Premise 8: Nitrogen pollution is a serious threat to pollinators
Premise 9: Make hay, not war
Premise 9: More pollinator habitat through more frequent fire.
Premise 10: Afforestation, an unknown but significant threat to pollinator survival
Conclusion
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Restoration Ecology
Environmental Preservation
Education & Outreach
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