By: Haley Gamertsfelder
Environmental Science and Technology, Natural Resource Management
Environmental Science and Technology, Natural Resource Management
“What is so important about a butterfly” is one of the questions overheard on good neighbor day when moral was running low. After a couple of hours of tedious planting and fence building, the volunteers were right in wondering what their efforts were for. Ecosystems are called systems for a reason they have intertwining, interlacing, functioning parts where one would not exist without the other. The university of Maryland campus is in itself an ecosystem; we have trees shrubs, flowers, grasses, insects, mammals, birds, and some amphibians and reptiles. Each one of these things interacts with another. Prince George's county, where UMD sits used to be home to the state insect of our university's’ namesake, The Baltimore Checkerspot Butterfly. It is now long gone, and only exists in 7 counties out of Maryland's’ 24. The vanEngelsdorp Honeybee lab as part of the Department of Entomology on Campus started a conservation effort in 2015 to bring this species back to the UMD ecosystem. With the generous donations, funding and grants received we were able to move forward with this project in big ways this semester.
 The Good Neighbor Day crew |  One of the Good Neighbor Day completed plots |
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