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Ecology’s lesson for us all on the importance of Diversity

In my world, “diversity” often comes with a prefix. I remember learning the word early in my college days, having come to the wildlife ecology discipline not as a woke environmentalist but rather because of an obsession with ducks from a childhood spent hunting them. “Biodiversity” wasn’t exactly something we talked about in the duck blind. But in those classes, and in the field where we were taught to make careful observations, and in the lab where we crafted experiments and did complicated statistics to control for variability, I learned to see the impacts of diversity in the natural world. Communities that have it are strong and resilient. Those that don’t are fragile and prone to collapse.

It’s perhaps best observed in places where it’s obviously lacking. Forests with ground floors carpeted by invasive plants like bush honeysuckle come undone at the seams. Native plants that support the cadre of insects that feed the wildlife can’t find a place to live. Changes in food sources causes the cardinal to look less cardinal. The trees overhead send their progeny to the ground but they can’t find a place to grow. When they do, they’re eaten by the deer that don’t care for the honeysuckle and are quick to eat any alternative. In the end, the whole system changes and becomes less diverse. Less colorful. Less noisy and less alive. It’s a monoculture. And monocultures fail....

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Redefining our relationship to "weeds"

Picture a weed. Or better yet, a mess of them.

Now, what if I told you to turn to a stranger contemplating the same question and share your imaginings: do you think you’d have pictured the same place or plants?

My guess is no.

Sure, I suspect some non-trivial proportion of Iowans reflecting on my prompt let their mind drift quickly to a stand of waterhemp towering over soybeans. But too, I bet just as many (almost certainly more actually) pictured piles of lambsquarters seedlings next to neat row of emerging garden plants. Others pictured a yard carpeted in yellow blooms in early summer, while some picture a pasture overrun with leafy spurge or Canada thistle. Others still, an image of a woodland carpeted in honeysuckle or garlic mustard. Among the boaters, perhaps a lake in August and a with propeller sheathed in an endless twine of submersed plants.

Now, I’m going to get back to this hypothetical, but let me take a brief pause for a confession. Wildlife, and thus wildlife biologists like me, love weeds. A drive past my house in Ames, where you’d see purple coneflower growing from cracks in my sidewalk, cages around volunteer walnut trees in the yard, and a whole third of the lawn in transition from what past owners mowed and yours truly does not, would provide sufficient evidence. Visit the addresses of other wildlife lovers like me throughout Iowa and you’ll find more of the same. We tend to go the way of Ralph Waldo Emmerson’s assertion that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have never been discovered.”

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