Arthropods in the City: A Research Project!

Hey fellow Somervillains, 

My name is Averie! Perhaps you’ve seen me around town staring a bit too closely at plants… I am here to share with you all a bit about the project that I’ve been conducting at the Somerville Community Growing Center this summer! After living in Somerville for years I stumbled upon the Growing Center. With its abundance of plants and insects in its urban location, it stood out to me as the perfect place to study the effects of urbanization on insect communities. 

I am a PhD student in environmental biology at Umass Boston conducting research on how climate change and urbanization affect interactions between organisms. Although I primarily focus on interactions among insects, the host plant that an insect lives and feeds on plays a surprisingly important role in how that individual behaves and can even alter the relationships that it has with others in the community. Human induced changes, such as construction and pollution, are known to impact the health, abundance, and diversity of plants in surrounding areas, and thus impact the organisms that rely on these plants for shelter and food. Climate change can alter ecosystems in unpredictable ways, making it vital to directly measure the impact of these human-driven alterations. 

The Experiment

For six weeks this summer I conducted an experiment at the Growing Center and other very different locations that aims to determine the impact that urbanization has on insect communities. To do so, I traversed Massachusetts gathering data from nine different locations: three urban, three suburban, and three rural. I visited each location once per week - maybe you noticed my neon pink tags? At every location, I recorded the type and number of arthropods on a selection of Milkweed plants and monitored how well the plants were growing. Arthropods, if you didn’t know, are invertebrates that have a segmented body and jointed appendages. I will be using the data collected to compare arthropod community composition over time and across an urbanization gradient, and hope to shed some light on how whole arthropod communities are affected by humans. 

Completing research, especially when using natural populations, takes a huge amount of effort, dedication, and time, and that is just to get the data! After data is collected, analysis can take months or even years to complete before any conclusions can be reached. Due to the overwhelming amount of data and the severe lack of time PhD students have, I won’t know any of my hard work’s findings for a few months at the least. Keep an eye out in the coming months for an update with some of my initial findings on this project. Sorry to leave everyone hanging; I hope the wait will be worth it!