Monthly Archives: April 2005

BUGS projects

28 Thursday Apr 2005

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http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/bugs/

I first suggested this site in April and had forgotten all about it until I was browsing through my newly reinstated archives tonight 🙂

This project studies urban gardens as a wildlife habitat.

A talk given by the Sheffield researchers at the Royal Horticultural Society Biodiversity Conference summarises some of the results of the project.

From that page:
Gardens are brilliant for wildlife. We found that garden size was completely irrelevant for the wildlife contained within it. Of course large gardens contain more biodiversity than small gardens because they are bigger, but there is no qualitative difference between a large garden and a small garden.

There was very, very little evidence in our results that where a garden was in a city had very much effect on the wildlife you could expect to find in it. So if you have a small garden and it’s a long way from the countryside, don’t give up is the message, you can still attract lots of interesting wildlife.

We found no evidence at all that the number of native plants in your garden has any effect on the invertebrate wildlife that your garden supports. It absolutely didn’t matter whether those plants were alien or native, it was simply the total diversity that was important.

We would simply say gardens are England’s most important nature reserve.

…………. you’re not considering paving over your garden for easy maintenance… are you???