Peregrine Audubon to host Leslie Mcginnis on Monarch butterflies
Peregrine Audubon will host Leslie Mcginnis on Monarch Butterflies in the garden at 7 p.m. today via zoom. To receive a link, subscribe to the mailing list at https://www.peregrineaudubon.org/
Peregrine Audubon Society is presenting a zoom meeting about monarch butterflies, monarch caterpillars, and the amazing interactions happening everyday in our suburban and urban garden ecosystems. The focus of this talk will be on the threats facing monarch caterpillars and how to use ecological concepts to guide management decisions in our own gardens.
Growing milkweed has increased dramatically in recent years, but gardeners can be overwhelmed with recommendations on what to grow and how to grow it. We will learn about some of the general recommendations, the science behind them, and how understanding our own gardens can help us tailor recommendations to our own garden ecosystems.
We will also learn about the dissertation research of our speaker, Leslie Mcginnis. The focus of Leslie's dissertation is on the milkweed gardens of the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, she is interested in (1) the social, commercial, and ecological processes shaping and connecting these gardens, (2) the plant species composition of these gardens and winter availability and care of milkweed, (3) community ecology surrounding predation of urban monarch caterpillars, (4) how host plant species traits, garden landscape characteristics, and season impact predation pressure on caterpillars.
Leslie Mcginnis is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Leslie grew up gardening in a rural area outside of Spokane, Washington in the foothills of the Selkirk Mountains. As a little girl, she would go with her family to old homesteads and fields and rescue heirloom perennials and native plants before they were bulldozed.
Leslie earned her BS at the University of Washington, studying topics ranging from the impacts of ecotourism on southern resident orcas, to the impacts of non-native tamarisk on insect communities, to tropical forests, to the evolutionary ecology of chili peppers.
After graduating, she taught middle school science in Los Angeles with Teach For America. During this time, she earned her teaching credential and partnered with the Sierra Club Inner City Outings program to take her students on hiking and camping trips in the Santa Monica Mountains and to tidepool and salt marsh ecosystems.
Leslie earned her MS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor with a strong emphasis on agroecology and continued her graduate studies in Berkeley. In addition to her doctoral research, Leslie has continued her commitment to education and increasing diversity in STEM fields. She has taught courses on urban gardening and agroecology, climate change in California, insect natural history, and interactions between society, culture, and the environment.
Additionally, she guided Environmental Science senior thesis students through the development and completion of individual research projects and mentored incoming first generation college students through Berkeley's Bridge Connect program. Firmly believing that science is for everyone, Leslie values research and research methods that are accessible to the general public and that honor the wealth of knowledge of gardeners, farmers, and backyard naturalists.