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STEAM Salon is an informal series held in the STEM Library of faculty and student speakers in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics who engage and inspire our university community with their current research.

Humans actively manage and alter the majority of earth's habitats. In this presentation, Dr. Karin Burghardt outlines ways that decisions within one's own personal scope of management (gardens, yards, parks, and other green spaces) alter plant/animal interactions. Further, Dr. Burghardt suggests tweaks that can be made to practices such as plant selection, yard care, and pest management practices to retain biodiversity and function in the spaces we inhabit everyday.

Dr. Karin Burghardt is an Assistant Professor in the Entomology Department at the University of Maryland and a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Trained as a community ecologist, she specializes in understanding plant-insect interactions in human-modified landscapes ranging from suburban yards to abandoned agricultural fields to managed forests.

By examining how human management practices alter the support of biodiversity in these spaces, the lab’s research program helps determine best practices for how humans can share space with a variety of flora and fauna.

Karin received her M.S. and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale University working with Oswald Schmitz on herbivore-induced defenses in goldenrod plants. Prior to that she received a B.S. from the University of Delaware in 2007 working with Douglas Tallamy on the role of non-native plants in ecosystems. Find more information on the lab’s work on her website.