Clarifying the Relationship Between Plant Provenance and Native Insect Pollinator Communities

Landscape architects are recognizing that one Rudbeckia is not necessarily very much like another, a fact that pollinators may know intuitively. A plant’s ability to support local insect pollinator communities seems to be related to its geographic lineage. My goal is to understand the strength of that relationship, relative to confounding site characteristics like microclimate and plant community composition. This research will help clarify the ecological function of locally sourced plants in landscape projects, and, I sincerely hope, help more designers understand why supporting native biodiversity requires adapting our practice to consider not just plant species but also plant source.