April 23, 2018
APDesign student awarded fellowship for green roof butterfly research
K-State College of Architecture, Planning and Design, or APDesign, student Pam Blackmore was awarded the 2018 Garden Club of America Board of Associates Centennial Pollinator Fellowship for her project "Butterflies, Tallgrass Prairie, and Green Roofs." This fellowship, co-sponsored by the Pollinator Partnership, provides funding to study the causes of pollinator decline that could lead to potential solutions for their conservation and sustainability.
The $4,000 fellowship will assist Blackmore in studying the butterfly communities of two K-State green roofs planted with native vegetation: the Memorial Stadium green roofs. She is evaluating the effectiveness of these green roofs to provide pollinator habitat in an urban context by comparing butterfly communities of the green roofs to urban native prairie at Warner Park and protected tallgrass sites at the Konza Prairie Biological Station.
Blackmore, a native of Alberta, Canada, is a second-year landscape architecture graduate student in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning. She obtained a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture in 2013 from Utah State University.
This award typically goes to students in science disciplines such as evolutionary biology, entomology, ecology, and zoology. Blackmore is the first landscape architecture student to receive this award.
"Receiving this fellowship means a lot to me because it shows the jury valued the research I'm conducting, even though I'm a landscape architecture student," Blackmore said. "I have an incredible team helping me, not only from my department, but also a wildlife biologist, botanist and many others from the K-State Division of Biology. I credit my phenomenal support team for receiving this award."
Lee Skabelund and Brent Chamberlain, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning, and Dave Haukos and Jeff Taylor, Division of Biology, are serving on Blackmore's committee for her master's thesis research. Blackmore began her study last May and continued all summer until after the Monarch migration came through Manhattan. She is using the funds to pay research assistants to help her in the field this summer.