Habitat Hero: Using native plants to engage communities in direct conservation action
- Travis Kurtz & Griffin Thompson
- 3 minutes ago
- 10 min read
By Travis Kurtz and Griffin Thompson
Takeaways
Native plant and seed giveaways are a cost-effective and versatile approach to education, outreach, and voluntary pollinator conservation on private land.
We were able to achieve our goal of creating a scalable and replicable program by creating transferable tools for data collection and data visualization, leading to the expansion of Habitat Hero to multiple environmental organizations.
By selectively and intentionally utilizing GIS tools like Survey123 and ArcGIS Online, we have been able to improve and grow the Habitat Hero program without impacting the quality of interactions with program participants.
Introduction
The drive to find activities that meet multiple outreach, education, and mission-focused goals is one that is shared by environmental organizations of all kinds. It can be difficult to create novel programs, or find existing programs, that can fulfill all of those objectives. John Ball Zoo has achieved these goals by developing and implementing an innovative approach to native plant giveaways.
Native plant and seed giveaways are frequently used as outreach and engagement tools by a wide range of community-based and environmental organizations. Distributing and planting native plants in urban and suburban settings has a number of environmental benefits, ranging from carbon and stormwater capture, to providing crucial food resources for pollinators in the forms of host plants, nectar, and pollen, to creating or improving habitat for various vertebrate and invertebrate species (Beckwith et al. 2022; Tallamy 2009, 2020).
Many North American pollinators have widespread distributions that include urban and suburban areas. With increased exploration into how pollinator populations are affected by urban habitats, it is important to also identify effective methods of urban pollinator conservation (Baldock 2020; Braman and Griffin 2022). One of the major challenges for urban biodiversity conservation is that land ownership is divided between a large number of private landowners on comparatively small parcels of land, making the conservation of large swaths of land very difficult and relying on the coordinated voluntary efforts of many individual landowners (Cerra 2017). This particular aspect of conserving urban pollinators is one that can be tackled in part by distributing native plants throughout a community.
At John Ball Zoo, we created a native plant giveaway program in 2022 called Habitat Hero to help create and improve urban pollinator habitat by giving away native trees, shrubs, wildflowers, grasses, and seed packets to members of local communities. As one of the four pillars of the Zoo’s Great Lakes conservation program, Habitat Hero is our flagship community science and conservation project. Through the development of key relationships with other community organizations, as well as through the use of GIS technologies for data collection and visualization, Habitat Hero has grown into a nationally recognized pollinator conservation program in the zoo and aquarium community.
Author and entomologist Doug Tallamy is the originator of the Homegrown National Park movement, which is built on the idea that American lawns, if utilized for native plantings, would create an area of approximately 20 million acres of native plant communities (Tallamy 2020). This ambitious vision for voluntary pollinator conservation is one of the animating forces of the Habitat Hero program. Starting with our local West Michigan communities and expanding out to the communities of our partner organizations, Habitat Hero is working to help people view themselves as pollinator conservationists in their own lives and local contexts.
Program description
Habitat Hero was initially created as a response to a local mayor’s urban tree planting initiative. The program includes both environmental and social goals that have been developed in pursuit of the larger goals of improving urban pollinator habitat. Environmentally, we want to increase the number of native perennial plants on the landscape to create patches of higher quality pollinator habitat and improve the connectivity between larger natural areas. Socially, we want to provide a pathway for individuals to engage in direct conservation action and provide informational resources to help participants better support pollinators in their own yards and gardens.
We set a benchmark for giving away at least 2,000 plants each year: 1,000 trees and shrubs and 1,000 wildflowers and grasses. We also give away over 1,000 seed packets each year, containing a mix of native wildflower and grass seeds. Over the past four years of giveaways we have continued to use 2,000 plants as our expected annual plant total. We select a variety of plants that will suit a variety of soil types, have varying light and water needs, and act as host species for a wide range of native pollinators. Since 2023, Habitat Hero has partnered closely with the Biology Department at Grand Valley State University. Dr. Alexandra Locher and some of her students have worked to integrate GIS into the Habitat Hero operational framework and have helped drive the adoption of many of our current data collection and visualization techniques.
Table 1: List of plants and quantities given away in 2025 | ||
TREES | ||
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) | 100 | |
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) | 120 | |
White Oak (Quercus alba) | 150 | |
American Hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana) | 150 | |
SHRUBS | ||
Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) | 100 | |
Northern Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) | 120 | |
New Jersey Tea (Ceanothus americanus) | 114 | |
Steeplebush (Spiraea tomentosa) | 152 | |
WILDFLOWERS/GRASSES | ||
Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) | 300 | |
Rough Blazing Star (Liatris aspera) | 152 | |
Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) | 152 | |
Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) | 190 | |
Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis) | 114 | |
Virginia Wild Rye (Elymus virginicus) | 114 | |
Pennsylvania Sedge (Carex pensylvanica) | 114 | |
At every event, we set up a simple booth inside a Habitat Hero-branded tent. Inside the tent is a table displaying one of each of the species of plants that we give away, along with plant fact sheets, basic plant care instructions, and tablets and laminated QR codes for participants to use to access the plant survey. The overall program premise is very straightforward: in exchange for submitting a survey response, each participant is welcome to take home up to four native plants per Habitat Hero event they attend.
As Habitat Hero has grown in popularity and recognition, developing a system for selecting which organizations to partner with and which of their events to attend has become an increasingly important part of the program. On average, the Habitat Hero booth has attended 33 community events per year. These events are split between events on zoo grounds and events throughout Kent County, MI. We have placed an emphasis on partnering with the neighborhood associations that are closest to the zoo as a way of engaging with and supporting the communities nearest to the zoo. The rest of the events are split between neighborhood associations, farmer’s markets, and community events whose focus aligns well with the goals of the Habitat Hero program.
Data Collection Methods
Main Plant Survey
Prior to 2024, the primary goal of our interaction with Habitat Hero participants was to provide a quick, streamlined interaction that maximized the likelihood of getting plants into the hands of as many community members as possible. Participants were asked to write down their name, email address, and zip code. Not only did this limit the amount of information we were able to collect and prevent us from conducting any further analyses, but manually interpreting and inputting the written data took substantially more time and led to a lower degree of precision in the recorded information.
By collecting data through a digital survey, we added a participatory GIS dimension to our program. Participatory GIS is described as “[involving] local communities in the creation of information to be fed into the GIS and subsequently used in spatial decision-making which affects them” (Dunn 2007). The voluntary submission of the locations where the plants are being planted by more than 80% of participants provides crucial information for a variety of analyses that would otherwise not be possible. As explained in Dunn’s definition above, there is a subsequent responsibility on the part of Habitat Hero project administrators to ensure that the results of these analyses are utilized for beneficial urban habitat management decisions in the communities where these plants have been distributed.
The survey that participants are currently asked to complete when receiving their plants is 13 questions in length, collecting important information such as participant email, the location where the plant is going to be planted, which plants the participant is receiving, and a variety of questions relating to the participant’s knowledge and opinions of native plants and pollinators. We built the survey using ESRI’s Survey123 software, which allows the data to easily be transferred into any of their other ArcGIS programs. Only two of the questions on the survey are required: zip code and partnering organization, while the rest are optional. We still request that participants complete the entire survey, but to respect the wide range of attitudes regarding the digital submission of personal information we have limited the number of required questions.
In addition to the plant survey that participants complete at the booth, we send a follow-up survey during the months of September, October, and November, asking participants to rate the health of their plants (Picture 5) and answer two questions about any changes to their behaviors related to pollinator conservation. Unsurprisingly, response rates to the follow-up survey are substantially lower than to the primary survey.
Follow-up with participants
A common shortcoming of these types of programs is that the interaction between the distributing organization and the plant recipients often ends at the point of distribution unless the recipient is a frequent visitor to that organization. The literature on these types of programs indicates that effective follow-up can be one of the most difficult components to get right (Nguyen et al. 2017).
When participants include their email address on the digital survey, they get signed up for a monthly Habitat Hero newsletter. This newsletter is our primary method for staying connected to participants beyond the initial exchange at the booth. The newsletter contains seasonally appropriate plant and pollinator information, as well as the upcoming events for the next month. Just over 3,000 people receive the newsletter each month, and 40-50% of recipients will open the newsletter in a given month.
Habitat Hero Dashboard
In addition to improving our data collection process, implementing participatory GIS also allowed us to visualize the data in a much more sophisticated and meaningful way. Griffin Thompson used the locations submitted by Habitat Hero participants to display the physical locations of the majority of the Habitat Hero plants that have been distributed using an ArcGIS Online Dashboard. Before publication to the dashboard, all potentially identifying information is removed from the data and the points are resized to protect the home addresses of the participants. Since being published, the Habitat Hero dashboard is accessible through the John Ball Zoo Habitat Hero webpage, as well as through the website of other partnering organizations.
The dashboard has transformed the manner in which we are able to show the collective effort and impact of the Habitat Hero program to audiences beyond program participants. Each point has three concentric buffers emanating from it at 250, 500, and 2,000 meters (blue, pink, and orange, respectively) to help visualize the approximate maximum foraging distances of various groups of pollinators. In working towards the conservation of highly migratory species such as the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus), the dashboard is a useful tool for showing how the Habitat Hero community is working towards a shared goal. When talking about how Habitat Hero is impacting pollinator conservation, the dashboard is a powerful tool for explaining why we need more than isolated local action to conserve highly migratory and widespread pollinator species.
Lessons Learned
Leading up to the implementation of our first digital survey during the 2024 Habitat Hero season, I was extremely reticent to switch from a paper sign-up sheet to a digital survey on a phone or tablet. My primary concern was that lengthening the interaction would decrease the likelihood of people receiving plants and contributing data. This concern was not reflected in a decrease in the rate at which participants filled out the digital survey following its implementation. By delaying the transition to the digital survey, I merely delayed our ability to begin visualizing and analyzing our Habitat Hero data.
For any organization deciding whether to engage their community through native plant giveaways, many of the considerations are the same. These include: Are there local native plant nurseries from whom we can purchase plants? Do we have the ability to physically house plants between events? Who is the core audience we are trying to reach with these programs? How do we plan to keep our participants engaged in this work? Do we have the capacity to evaluate, analyze, and share the results of these programs? And if not, are there local organizations that we may be able to partner with to conduct evaluation and analysis? Perhaps most importantly, are we willing to commit to the timeline required to build a community of participants and make a tangible impact on our local community? Answering no to any of these questions does not preclude an organization from effectively utilizing native plant giveaways but instead helps to proactively highlight any potential obstacles to long-term success.
Conclusion
John Ball Zoo is just one of many organizations that utilize plant giveaways as a tool for achieving both conservation and outreach goals. However, by utilizing available GIS tools such as Survey123 and ArcGIS Online, we have been able to create a scalable and replicable pollinator conservation framework that continues to create pollinator habitat in West Michigan and beyond. In 2025, three organizations joined the Habitat Hero program to pilot expansion to external organizations. In 2025, an additional seven organizations are joining Habitat Hero as partner organizations.
These organizations commit to being part of the Habitat Hero network by giving away native plants in their communities, utilizing our surveys, and contributing to the dataset displayed on the dashboard. This growth is a signal that communities around the country desire opportunities to tangibly improve their local urban environments through direct action. Habitat Hero’s ability to meet that desire for pollinator conservation would not be possible without the use of Survey123 and ArcGIS Online, and we will continue to utilize available GIS technologies to increase our impact for native pollinators.
Author Attributions
Travis Kurtz is the Community Science Coordinator at John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Griffin Thompson is a biology graduate student at Grand Valley State University. Correspondence about this article can be addressed to Travis Kurtz at tkurtz@jbzoo.org.
References
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Beckwith, Brenda R., Eva M. Johansson, and Valerie J. Huff. "Connecting people, plants and place: A native plant society's journey towards a community of practice." People and Nature 4, no. 6 (2022): 1414-1425.
Braman, S. Kristine, and Becky Griffin. "Opportunities for and impediments to pollinator conservation in urban settings: A review." Journal of Integrated Pest Management 13, no. 1 (2022): 6.
Cerra, Joshua F. "Emerging strategies for voluntary urban ecological stewardship on private property." Landscape and Urban Planning 157 (2017): 586-597.
Dunn, Christine E. "Participatory GIS—a people's GIS?." Progress in human geography 31, no. 5 (2007): 616-637.
Nguyen, Vi D., Lara A. Roman, Dexter H. Locke, Sarah K. Mincey, Jessica R. Sanders, Erica Smith Fichman, Mike Duran-Mitchell, and Sarah Lumban Tobing. "Branching out to residential lands: Missions and strategies of five tree distribution programs in the US." Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 22 (2017): 24-35.
Tallamy, Douglas W. Bringing nature home: how you can sustain wildlife with native plants, updated and expanded. Timber Press, 2009.
Tallamy, Douglas W. Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard. Timber Press, 2020.