In the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis, at the intersection of Lawrence and De Tonty streets, a garden grows. Part of it is fenced off, with tiered garden beds divided into orderly sections. To the right is a trampled-down path along the base of a sloping hill, passing through a prairie of tall grasses and wildflower stalks.
Now, the plants are either cleared or dead, hibernating in wintry shades of brown and gray, but come next spring, they will blossom into an urban oasis dotted with native flowers. Along the edge of the plot is a metal barrier, separating it from I-44. Noise from highway traffic hums in the background.
Green House Venture’s Embankment Greenway regularly hosts field trips for elementary school students, allowing them to learn through hands-on learning experiences. Over the past few years, the site has also piqued the interest of bioscience researchers from local universities.
Beginning in March, Aimee Dunlap, a professor of biology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and a team of graduate students will begin a study to track the behaviors of bees and other pollinators at the site.
“Green House Venture has this very cool campus, and previously they had learned from a former collaborator of ours that there are about 50 species of bees that have come into their campus since they’ve planted everything. And we’re interested in knowing more about what they are doing there, like how are they using the space?” said Dunlap.
According to Dunlap, her team is interested in recording three major behaviors: nesting, pollen and nectar collection and travel.
Team members will visually scan the embankment for nests, looking for bees entering and leaving holes in the ground. Using GoPro cameras to collect footage of flowers, they will collect data on the number of bees, flies and wasps visiting. Finally, they will collect pollen samples to infer where pollinators are traveling beyond the Embankment Greenway.
The study aims to provide insight into how green spaces along highways could help rejuvenate declining pollinator populations. It could also have broader implications in making urban farming viable as a means to reduce the environmental impact of food shipping and to remediate food deserts.
The project also involves educational outreach in partnership with Green House Venture. Students from local elementary schools will have the opportunity to visit the site and assist with the research process.
“Our whole mission is not to bring kids a child-size, manipulable world, but to bring them into the adult world,” said Donald Stump, vice president and chairman of the Program and Curriculum Committee at Green House Venture. He hopes the program will spark a love of science that might one day lead them to choose a career in St. Louis’ thriving bioscience and agricultural research industries.
According to Stump, allowing kids to make meaningful contributions to a real research project and connecting to the land is part of that process. “Let’s bring them into a place where we're trying to restore a native Missouri plant population that supports those bees,” he said.
George Todd, a Ph.D. student working with Dunlap’s Cognitive Ecology Lab, explained that being able to share something he’s passionate about with a younger generation adds excitement to the work.
“As scientists, sometimes we fall into a pattern,” he said. “It's just our job and our career, and while we may find it interesting or cool sometimes, we're kind of constantly thinking, OK, like, what's the next step? But when you share research, and have students get involved in research in various ways, their excitement can really help bring back the joy.”
“We love bees,” added Dunlap. “When you work with them so closely, you just gain so much respect and affection for what they do – what they do for the environment, what they do for the planet, and what they do for us – and to be able to share that enthusiasm is so much fun.”
Field work will begin in the spring and is projected to last through the end of next summer. A growing body of research on pollinator collapse and urban farming could persuade the Department of Transportation to consider transforming unused space along highways into biodiverse greenspaces on a broader scale.
