Val wrote a new article on backyard habitat and biodiversity that was published in Pacific Horticulture Magazine here. The article includes a link to a Web Extra on ecological memory. Building on the original article on the importance of backyard habitat to urban biodiversity ( Rudd, H., Vala, J. and V.H. Schaefer 2002), in the [Continue]

I developed an Urban Habitat Quality Index to help identify a threshold between functional resilient communities and those that have not yet achieved the biodiversity and inter- and intra-species relationships to be functional. The index was developed while I was on a sabbatical in Oxford, UK, and was in part inspired by an article on [Continue]

Moments in Nature: A Journal is the title of the living document version of Beyond the Pail – a 270 page book with its own ISBN. I continued to add more stories to the original book. To distinguish it from the completed Beyond the Pail I gave the new evolving expanded version the new name [Continue]

When returning to sites that we restored it was clear that in some of them the plants had survived but they were not forming communities. We were essentially landscaping with native plants rather than restoring natural areas. This raised the question of was a planting a functioning system and when was it just ornamental. On [Continue]

The University of Victoria campus is a unique and important natural area. The campus is in four watersheds that extend in all directions through Victoria, Oak Bay and Saanich. It has several large forests, Garry Oak meadows, the remnants of an old orchard, a ravine, stormwater management installations that include several rain gardens, and hundreds [Continue]

Having spent a sabbatical earlier this year with trips to Oxford and San Francisco, Val shares his images and impressions about the urban forest and novel ecosystems he observed in these two landscapes along the theme of layered landscapes. The presentation is available here in two parts – Part 1 and Part 2.