Monarchitects Project
The project members presenting their project at an annual ESW Conference at UC Berkley.
From left to right: Aum Gandhi, Kathy Eung, Sohn Cook.
The project poster made for Green Generation Sustainability Mixer at California State University, Long Beach.
The project members presenting their project at an annual ESW Conference at UC Berkley.
Project Team Members: Aum Gandhi, Sohn Cook, Kathy Eung, Cherie Woo
Project Status: Implementation Stage
We partnered with Long Beach Organic Inc. (LBO), a nonprofit organization that provides organic community gardens for the Long Beach community. We discussed several community issues with LBO, including transportation and accessibility to public space, but decided to focus on sustainable agriculture and monarch conservancy in the gardens. Furthermore, with urbanization and development along our coast, wetlands have become degraded and damaged. For this reason, the decline of insect populations and native plant species could cost our urban agricultural community many wasted resources and deprive this planet of many species.
Goal: The goal of this project is to take an approach from a botanical level and use native plants to encourage the growth of native insect species that have long been affected by global warming and the invasion of migratory species.
Background: A variety of native insects will be researched as the joint research with this community continues, but there is one insect that is already a primary goal: The Monarch Butterfly. Monarch Butterflies are going extinct due to global warming affecting their migratory patterns and the milkweed that they feed on. Mexican milkweed may be doing more harm than good despite its ease of use, so this project aims to tie in the Monarchs into the native insect revival by researching the feasibility of native milkweeds. In conclusion, this is a botanical approach to the revival of native species and wetlands recovery in the Long Beach area, with the community being the community garden on 10th and Grand Ave. There is a relationship of mutualism between insects, plants, and humans that can show the bigger picture to the local community.
Awards: We presented our design challenge solution at the 2016 ESW Annual Conference at UC Berkeley. We were awarded $1000 to implement our project solution and raise awareness. We plan on implementing waystations at three Long Beach urban gardens as well as collecting data for our GIS system.