"Spontaneous vegetation," more commonly known as weeds, usually gets a pretty bad rap. Tell me about emerging research around weeds and how perceptions are changing.

Society tends to view weeds as offering very little to biodiversity and also not contributing much in the way of ecosystem services, but these plants are actually quite opportunistic, and due to climate change, what is considered a "native plant" is rapidly evolving. As the planet heats up, many species' ranges are shifting north, which presents an opportunity to reconsider both the biodiversity contribution of spontaneous vegetation and also what we think of as a native plant.

One of the main things we are learning from current research is that people's perceptions often depend on maintenance. The work of my colleague, Joan Nassauer, (Professor, Environment and Sustainability) has demonstrated that by doing very small things to vacant lots, they can appear a lot more acceptable to the community. I think it's not so much the weeds as how they are framed and packaged. I see that shift already happening as people become more aware of how biodiverse some of these vegetation communities are. [Compared to nothing, or turf grass], weeds attract more wildlife—more birds, more bees, everything that people like. I think as more people realize that, their perceptions will shift.

And where does the catalyst project come in?

Daniel Phillips (Ph.D. student at the School for Environment and Sustainability and Mark’s advisee) had this idea, using a small grant from Graham, to start an herbarium project, where we set out to catalog the various types of vegetation present at different locations in Detroit. That project turned into the catalyst grant, where we investigated people's perceptions of these vegetation types.

We also looked at the practices that both the Detroit Public Services department and informal groups like the Detroit Mower Gang employ. The Mower Gang self-organized on Facebook and now they just go out and run their lawnmowers. They just love to ride and to mow, so that's what they do. We wanted to better understand their maintenance practices–how they decide where to mow–and also how they perceive some of these sites, because typically if they go to a site, they just clear-cut it.

That's a different approach than what we were advocating in terms of looking at the biodiversity and ecosystem services that the spontaneous vegetation there provides. The areas we were looking at—mostly overgrown lots—are not blank slates, and we wanted to help the residents and community groups understand the types of vegetation that might be there. We thought, instead of clear-cutting a particular site, maybe they could work with what was already there.

How did the concepts of "co-creation" or "co-design" inform your work on this project?

Co-creation or co-production typically means that researchers are either working directly with the end-consumers of the research or at least have them in mind. Historically, universities have been criticized for being these ivory towers that are not in touch with their surrounding communities. But increasingly, especially at SEAS and at the University of Michigan, before researchers start the project there is at least a discussion about who the end-users might be.

What co-design means in my area of landscape architecture is unique because we are often designing public spaces. In my lab, we try to define research questions based on what is going to be beneficial to stakeholders. For example, we were recently building a 3D modeling software and sat down with a group of residents before we wrote one line of code to say: would this benefit you? Once we developed the software, we sat down with them again to co-design the landscape, which is similar to the process we used in the Rustbelt Herbarium project.

Part of the co-production process [for the Rustbelt Herbarium] was figuring out how we want to frame the research outputs because not many people want to sit down and read a 6,000-word journal paper. We considered a variety of options and decided that using ArcGIS StoryMaps [to create the Mow Town story map] was an engaging way to integrate the audio, video, and spatial components of the project.

We hope that the groups we worked with, but also people working for the city of Detroit and possibly even Detroit residents, can access and make use of the tool. We actually presented some of this work at a conference in April and at one point during that presentation we jumped out of the PowerPoint and opened up the story map and started going through it because it’s much more engaging. I think that shows that a lot of these “alternative” outputs for an academic project can work in a number of settings.