Creating Green Cities: Native Plant Restoration in Urban Environments
By Tess Petrillo, Environmental Studies ‘25
This past summer for my undergraduate capstone experience, I worked on a project centered on ecological inequity and habitat fragmentation. Ecological equity refers to improving green space accessibility and providing a healthy environment for everyone. Habitat fragmentation refers to the ways that industrialization has altered the landscape and made it less suitable for native flora and fauna. These issues are important to me because they influence how to best approach conservation efforts in anthropogenic, industrialized environments, and are at the intersection of my two passions: restoration and environmental justice. Historically, conservation efforts have prioritized remote environments, while urban environments have been ignored and deemed irreparable. This project seeks to shift the way conservation is executed by transferring restoration methods for wildlife habitat to urban spaces.
To bring this idea into fruition, I wanted to design a tool that could inform urban communities on the best methods of urban habitat restoration. First, I sought to discover the best practices for native plant restoration and how they can be applied to urban environments. To promote native plant production in cities, I determined that restoration in urban spaces should be widespread. To achieve this, gardening and restoration education must become widely available, environmental stewardship must be accessible, and the responsibility of restoration should be shifted from government agencies or nonprofits directly to communities at the site. I interned with the Nature Stewards Program, a restoration organization based in south Seattle. During the internship, I worked in a native plant garden, helped restore wetland areas, and recorded best practices for promoting native plant growth and weeding invasive species. Additionally, I interviewed eight professionals working in native plant reintroduction or green space management and asked them about the logistics of green space production.
From the data I collected, I composed a manual detailing the processes of green space projects such as land acquisition, landscape design, ecology, community collaboration, funding, and volunteer recruitment. This manual intends to be a guide for motivated community members to organize sustainable green space projects that promote native plant production in the environment they inhabit. By making this information accessible through a concise and digestible format, my hope is that green space production will become more common on a local, community scale.This ensures that urban environments are restored and cared for while improving environmental health and ecological resilience, and keeping it focused on local communities.
The proliferation of this information starts with motivated community members. If you don’t have the time or resources to create a green space project, volunteering to maintain a local park, starting a community garden in your front lawn, or organizing a litter clean up in your neighborhood are all still great ways to get involved. We have the ability to build greener cities. Once we take the initiative, the possibilities are endless.