Your landscape, no matter how small or large, can provide valuable habitat for wildlife and pollinators.
One of the main drivers of loss of biodiversity is loss of habitat. When we lose biodiversity, we lose ecosystem services-- the things that nature does for us that we take for granted, like pollination, groundwater recharge, and flood control.
To maintain as many ecosystem services as possible and reduce our expenses for replacing those sorts of services, we need to make every effort to restore native plants to our developed areas.
As we continue to take over natural spaces, we can choose to design our man-made landscapes in ways that will restore ecosystem services that are typically lost due to habitat destruction. This concept of designing our human-dominated landscapes such that they can be shared with nature and provide improved ecosystem services is known as reconciliation ecology.
By simply using more native plants in our landscaping, we can reduce soil erosion and flooding, increase groundwater recharge, and provide more sustenance for wildlife.
We can help rebuild the damaged food web and bring to our landscape more opportunity to admire the beauty of nature in the butterflies, birds, bees, and bats (and many other animals that don't start with "b") attracted to the bounty we've provided .
