By Paige Boyle
This past summer, I completed my first season of MSP LTER Pollinator Habitat data collection. I spent 3 weeks in the Twin Cities with my undergraduate helper from the University of St. Thomas, Eli, identifying plants in home lawns throughout the metro (Figure 1), getting rained on, and talking to homeowners about their yards.
We got caught up in a bunch of thunderstorms, learned a lot of new-to-us plants, picked and tasted some ripe raspberries (with permission, of course!), met some sweet pets, and encountered a lot of mosquitoes, turfgrass diseases, creatures, and fungi (Figure 2). It was a very wet summer, as many of you know.
Over the 2024 sampling period, we identified 95 vegetation species (not including categories like bare soil and diseased or unidentifiable leaves) across the 83 lawns sampled. Like past years, Kentucky bluegrass, fine fescue, and perennial ryegrass made up the top 3 species across all home lawns (Figure 3). The ten most abundant species across all lawns this year also included tall fescue, white clover, ground ivy, smooth and hairy crabgrasses, creeping bentgrass, and black medic.
This year, we also added a handful of households who have been through the official Lawns to Legumes program, bringing our total number of lawns to 83. We will continue to gather data on all lawns over the coming years to determine how these Lawns to Legumes lawns differ from the self-reported bee lawns and more traditional lawns we’ve been monitoring.
See the article Long-Term Ecological Research: Bee Lawns in the Twin Cities for some of the previous work done by our team on this project.