Hope Grows for ‘Wildlife-Friendly’ Plant Certification Program

Plant life that welcomes wildlife and promotes pollinator activity around the garden is a natural selling point for consumers. And that market trend is growing. That’s why a group of researchers across multiple academic disciplines at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) are working collaboratively to develop a certification program for wildlife-friendly plants.

Right now, the process might go like this: A customer wants to buy tropical milkweed for monarchs. He or she might go to a big-box store that sells plants that may have been treated with systemic insecticides.

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Those chemicals contain prolonged residual toxicity to monarch larvae. Thus, the customer might buy a wildlife-attracting plant that actually harms wildlife, says Jaret Daniels, a UF/IFAS Professor of entomology and principal investigator for the project.

“We want to change this with a certification program that enables consumers to buy with confidence,” he says. “Similarly, some plants might be marketed as pollinator attractors, but we want to put some hard data behind this to evaluate which plants are most attractive. In essence, we want to cut through all this confusion to label them as UF-certified – therefore enabling consumers to readily identify wildlife-safe and wildlife-friendly plants that have thoroughly been evaluated.

“Ideally we want to ensure growers have appropriate and effective alternatives for pest control — options that are not harmful for pollinators and other wildlife,” adds Daniels.

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Plants marketed as wildlife-friendly currently do not have to meet standards for how growers control pests during production and whether potentially detrimental chemicals persist on plants after they have been purchased. If the UF project works, growers and buyers will know the plants are safe.

“We envision a UF plant label akin to ‘Proven Winners,’” Daniels says. “Right now, there is no such program, and there’s a lot of misleading information out there.”

The UF/IFAS-funded project comes from a Research Opportunity Seed Fund grant.

For more, continue reading at blogs.ifas.ufl.edu.

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