Earth Week

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A large fluffy bee drinking from a shallow pool of water

If You’re Thirsty, They’re Thirsty: Make a Simple Water Source To Support Pollinators

Even a humble puddle can make a big impact for your backyard wildlife. Learn how to make one that fits your space.

Several people gathered together to plant a tree. One holds the tree steady while others shovel in dirt around it.

Stronger Together: How To Build Your Conservation Community This Earth Week

Building your community can help us do more for conservation, and lightens the load and keeps us coming back to the causes we care about. Here's how!

Several flowering perennial plants along the edge of a sidewalk.

They Go with Everything: Even a Small Patch of Native Wildflowers Makes a Difference

Jennifer Hopwood shares how adding even a few plants is the perfect complement to the other habitat features of your yard, garden, or balcony.

A bee emerging from its nest entrance, which has been dug into sandy soil. The bee has a black body covered all over in short blonde fur.

Clear Space for Bees: Why Pollinators in Your Yard Need Access To Bare Ground

Open patches of soil and sand, with few or no plants, are a key nesting habitat for the majority of native bees, and easy for us to provide.

A mining bee peeking its fuzzy head out of its burrow, dug out of soil directly under a stone. The bee is covered in orange fluffy fur. Numerous other beneficial insects also make their homes in gaps or burrows dug out from the soil under a stone.

Wildlife on the Rocks: Providing the Rocky Habitats Bugs Need for Shelter

Rock piles and stone walls might seem like they take yard space away from plants, but these features are crucial to support a diverse wildlife community.

A bright metallic green bee peeking its head out of a round hole in a mossy log. Once, a beetle excavated this tunnel, on its way out from the fallen log that it had lived inside as a larva. Now, the bee has remodeled the tunnel for its nest.

Tiny Places for Tiny Animals: Building the Microhabitats that Bugs Need to Thrive

It’s easy to add small features, like a brush pile, dead stems, or a leafy corner that can make a big difference for wildlife! Here's how.

Metallic and multicolored dogbane beetle

This Earth Day, Celebrate the Stars of Biodiversity: Insects

With over a million invertebrates on earth, they are exemplary specimens for biodiversity. We need your help to advocate for these creatures!

Moon-marked skipper butterfly on a flower

Without State-Level Protection, These Invertebrates Face an Uncertain Future

These nine valuable and vulnerable insects are living in states where state wildlife agencies can't effectively protect them because state law doesn't include insects in the formal definition of wildlife. We're working to change that and protect these incredible invertebrates for years to come.

A Day Without Invertebrates

Individual invertebrates can be easily overlooked, but if we were to lose this group of animals, our world would look and feel significantly different.

Insects Are Wildlife, Too

State wildlife agencies are vital to species conservation, but they can't effectively protect ecosystems when legal barriers exclude certain animals from their jurisdiction. There are several U.S. states that have little or no ability to manage and protect insects.

Eastern swallowtail butterfly on buttonbush

Ways to Defend Biodiversity this Earth Week

Earth Week only comes once a year, so let's make it count! Defend biodiversity this week with one of these high-impact actions.

A monarch butterfly drinks nectar from a purple coneflower in the middle of a field of wildflowers. The monarch is orange-brown with black markings. The coneflowers have a reddish-brown raised dome in the center that is surrounded by drooping purple petals. The other flowers in the meadow are yellow and pink, and beyond is wall of green trees that forms the edge of a woodland.

For Wildlife and Humans, Native Plants Are a Key to Climate Resilience

In our work, we regularly put an emphasis on the importance of using native plants when creating habitat, whether it’s a new prairie, a farm hedgerow, a meadow in a park, or a flower border in your own backyard. Pollinators are often the principal interest for these types of projects, but the benefits of using native plants go far beyond, including, potentially, into a more climate-resilient future for people and wildlife.

Santa Fe Extension Master Gardeners and the habitat kits they are about plant at the Santa Fe County Extension Office Demonstration Gardens. The eighteen species in the kits are native, climate-resilient species which will support a diversity of native pollinators across seasons. (Photo: Kaitlin Haase / Xerces Society)

Conserving Desert Pollinators and Water in the Face of Climate Change

One of the most immediate and tangible ways we can prepare for climate change as individuals is to restore native habitat. This not only builds a greater buffer for plants and animals to survive changing conditions, but makes our own gardens and landscapes more prepared to withstand drier or wetter, hotter or colder weather. While it will take everyone to stop rising temperatures at a global scale, I find hope in the cultivation of little patches of earth throughout Santa Fe hosting pollinator habitat kits.

Young Nebraska Ecologists group climbs a hill in Gjerloff Prairie for Bumble Bee Atlas Surveys (c. Britton Bailey)

This Earth Week, We’re Finding Hope on the Climate Crisis

The week leading up to Earth Day, now in its 52nd year, is always a great time for reflection for conservationists. For challenges that feel unwieldy, like climate change, taking action helps us to feel less hopeless and more empowered. As we talk with others about what we’re doing and why, we can inspire them to join us.

A bottle of vinegar lies on a table beside a bowl full of slices of peach and cherry tomatoes

Bee Better Certified: One Acre at a Time

When we launched Bee Better Certified® in 2017, our sights were set high on a large long-term goal: to move the agricultural industry towards being a safer landscape for bees and other pollinators. Large-scale change happens little by little over an extended period of time, and with each year that passes we continue to see increased interest and adoption of the program throughout the food industry.

A cluster of several dozen orange-and-black monarch butterflies rest on the branches of a pine tree

Applying a Holistic Approach to Monarch Conservation

Xerces is a science-based conservation organization and our work on monarchs is no different. Whether it is restoring overwintering sites in California, creating breeding habitat in New York State, or protecting monarchs from pesticides, science informs our actions and maximizes our conservation return.

A glow-worm with an elongated and segmented body of dark brown with pink stripes

Supporting Firefly Conservation from Coast to Coast

Late spring and early summer are synonymous with fireflies. Females perch on vegetation or sit on the ground while males take flight, flashing their abdomens and awaiting a response from below. For humans, it could just as well be a magic show, a glimmering peek at one of the great wonders of the natural world.

A small black-and-white striped bee is curled over with its head in a pink flower to reach the nectar

Ask for a Healthier World

Do you want a more bee-friendly community or a different way to control mosquitoes? Change can start with a simple ask. Asking, if done respectfully and with curiosity, can bring empowerment and strengthen community.

The long coiled body of a brown centipede shines against the dark soil

The Actual Earth of Earth Week

Soils support the most biologically rich animal communities on earth, outside of our oceans. A single cubic foot of tallgrass prairie soil may contain billions of organisms, and more species diversity than the entire above-ground Amazon rainforest. Yet we think little of this life.

This graphic depicts a Checklist of Actions to Promote Pollinators in Yards, Gardens, and Parks; a score sheet for your site; a plant list; and a phone displaying a photo of some flowering habitat in front of a small house.

How to Maximize Benefits to Pollinators in Cities and Towns

Pollinators are one of the easiest groups of declining animals to support in a residential landscape, since even small spaces have the potential to meet the most basic needs of the entire insect life cycle—and even simple changes to our landscaping can make a huge difference to these animals. Here at the Xerces Society, we recently created an Urban Habitat Assessment tool, designed to help you see your yard through the eyes of a pollinator, identify areas for improvement, and prioritize actions you can take to promote these insects in your yard and community.

The front page of the guide Supporting Ecologically Sound Mosquito Management: Protecting Pollinators from Pesticides is shown, with some large text blocks and an image of a field in which different insects, including butterflies and bees, are shown in a landscape.

Start Now To Prevent Mosquito-Borne Disease and Keep Our Pollinators Safe

The Xerces Society’s new fact sheet, Smarter Pest Management: Responding to Mosquito-Borne Disease and Protecting Pollinators, highlights ways for everyone to prevent mosquito-borne disease, with recommendations that are backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Amid a mountainous, meadow-strewn landscape, three people holding butterfly nets walk along a narrow, dirt trail.

Tracking Butterfly Populations through Community Science

Last year, the Xerces Society partnered with the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument to launchthe Cascade-Siskiyou Butterfly Monitoring Network. Though the 2020 field season is facing uncertainty, there are still ways for you to get involved with butterfly research where you live.

Two women, one with dark hair and a hat, and one with bright red hair, look at a white insect net while standing in a grassy field.

Nebraska Bumble Bee Atlas: Doing a Little to Impact the Whole

The 2020 survey season begins this June. We hope you’ll join us in our quest to learn more about bumble bees and restore Nebraska’s natural habitats.

A fuzzy, primarily yellow, bee flies towards a purple sprig of flowers. The bee and the flowers are in sharp focus. The background, made up of purples and reds, is blurred.

This Earth Week, Let's Bring Communities Together to Protect Pollinators

Bee City USA provides a framework for communities to work together to conserve native pollinators by providing them with healthy habitat, rich in a variety of native plants, and free to nearly free of pesticides.

The cover of Dave Goulson's book, The Garden Jungle or Gardening to Save the Planet is shown. It has hand-painted illustrations of flowers and insects.

Earth Week Reading: Gardening to Save the Planet

Rich Hatfield, Senior Endangered Species Conservation Biologist, writes in this book review, "I was expecting The Garden Jungle: or Gardening to Save the Planet to be a great read, but for me it was more than that."

A small house with light paint and bright blue trim is dwarfed by the lush garden in the foreground, featuring flowers of a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.

12 Climate Actions for Earth Week

Some good news (amidst all the bad lately) is that even with physical distancing and shelter-in-place requirements, there are still a lot of actions many of us can take to help in the fight against climate change. Focusing on one or any combination of these actions can help.

An orange and black monarch nectars on the orange flowers of butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).

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