I embrace our university’s role as an urban land grant university in my interactions with community members. Because I work on pollinators, I often find my expertise in demand. In 2018, I became a Missouri Master Gardener with the Missouri Botanical Garden as a way to build bridges to gardeners in St. Louis. I created the first Native Pollinators curriculum for the St. Louis region Master Naturalists, and then taught that section of their training for a number of years. I also created two three-hour courses for the Master Pollinator Stewardship certification, and taught that as well for a number of sessions (the certification has not repeated since the pandemic). I have given many talks to local and regional garden clubs and native plant societies. While the content of the talks may vary, typical themes include bee sensory ecology and decision making and how we can use that knowledge to help us choose plants and design gardens. Some of my graduate students have also taken on this role, with a great amount of talks and short magazine pieces among them.
My community involvement has expanded with our work on the urban orchards research project. Urban community orchards are a growing movement and St. Louis is now home to more than 60 of them. We are currently working within 18 community orchards, and each year of the project I and my collaborators have trained around 30 undergraduates in informal science communication with the public. Collaborator Nicole Miller-Struttmann and I have coordinated with the leaders of each of these orchards, learning what needs they have for information about pollination and pollinators. We have attended many harvest festivals, bonfire events, Easter egg hunts, planting days and more. We presented at the Seed St. Louis urban agriculture conference, with recommendations for gardeners, and also hosted an afternoon at UMSL for the attendees of a national Giving Grove conference, attended by community orchardists and nonprofit managers from around the country.
A major framework of the orchard work is looking at the socio-environmental matrix surrounds each location. St. Louis is a fairly segregated city, both racially and socioeconomically. Many neighborhoods are food deserts, including my own, and this has motivated both my research and my community involvement as a volunteer applying my professional skills. I have been deeply involved in the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group, a neighborhood organization and a Community Development Corporation which works on the social and physical fabric of a formerly red-lined historic neighborhood. I work on improving pollination services in the 13th Street Community garden, which grows food for the North City Farmer’s Market where neighbors can pick up fresh produce every Saturday for free (it is an optional donation system). I start the seeds every spring for this garden. The Old North St. Louis neighborhood also has a low tree equity score, and I was able to help outline the logic for a proposal for $20,000 to plant and care for more trees to combat urban heat island effects. I have also contributed time to writing grants for the organization. Last year I was able to bring in $455,000 with a neighborhood transformation grant, as well as a second grant that I and a neighbor wrote was funded by the St. Louis Development Corporation for around $50,000. I was very proud to win the campus’ Excellence in Civic Engagement award this past spring for this and other work.
Finally, in terms of educational broader impacts, my lab has been deeply involved in training both high school students and undergraduates. We hosted many high school students as part of the Students and Teachers as Research Scientists (STARS) program, which is no longer running. I have also been involved in our campus’s CLIMB program and its predecessor where students from poorly funded public high schools are brought into labs at UMSL as paid interns. We have hosted a student or two for every year in which this program has run.
Dunlap Cognitive Ecology Lab 