F i r e f l y F u t u r e s
Conor O’Shea aims to protect insect species through biodiverse landscape architecture
Kevin Moriarty
It’s nearly time for class to start as professor Conor O’Shea sits down at his desk in his downtown Chicago office. As he slides a pair of VR goggles over his face, he is transported into a virtual world designed by one of his students. It’s the last natural area left in an otherwise dark and desolate, future version of Chicago void of much life. This virtual world is imagining what the future could look like without insects and pollinators.
Scientists have observed a global decline in insect species in recent decades. A 2019 UN report estimated that some 500,000 insect species are threatened with extinction. Insects are critical for our food web and the ecosystem services preformed by insects are valued at an estimated 57 billion to the US economy according to the Huck Institute of Life Sciences at Penn State University.
O’Shea is a certified landscape architect in the state of Illinois and teaches his trade to students at the university of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His teaching, research and client work is all driven by his passion for protecting insects and designing urban landscapes that work for humans and insects. In his class, O’Shea uses VR technology from Meta’s Horizon Worlds application to lead his students through an unconventional design studio in the metaverse. The application, which launched in 2021, allows anyone with a Meta Quest headset to socialize, explore and immerse themselves in virtual worlds. O’Shea and his students took full advantage of what this nascent technology had to offer. He dubbed the studio “firefly futures,” challenging his students to incorporate knowledge about firefly ecology into landscape design. Based on Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, student’s imagined future scenarios in the metaverse without fireflies, essentially asking: what might a future version of Chicago be like if we lose fireflies and other insect life that keep the ecosystem in balance? “We are being critical about the present by creating a science fiction scenario,” said O’Shea about wrestling with the issues fireflies are facing.
Firefly habitat is difficult to find in a city like Chicago. Things like rotten logs, unraked leaves and dense ground cover are seen as eye sores to many homeowners and land managers. There is a culture of “mow and blow,” along with the use of pesticides, to create aesthetically pleasing spaces, but those manicured spaces leave a bare and toxic landscape for fireflies and other insect species.
“The way that landscapes are managed and built in places like Chicago are just absolutely deadly for insects,” said O’Shea, “I just imagine a very different scene that I think really just starts with the plants that will attract insects, which then of course feed birds and other animals all the way up the food chain.”
Scientists have not reached a consensus, but there is evidence that fireflies are in decline in the US and elsewhere, with some species at risk of extinction. The firefly is a species of beetle with the ability to produce a bioluminescent glow. Their glow comes from a chemical reaction in the abdomen and the light that is produced is nearly 100% efficient, meaning little to no energy is lost as heat. By comparison, an incandescent light bulb is only about 10% efficient, with 90% of the energy produced being lost as heat.
This unique bioluminescent glow is also how fireflies find and attract potential mates, but their glow is being drowned out by light pollution. Light pollution is a side effect of urbanization, it is the excess light that comes from developed areas. In densely populated areas, light pollution brightens the night sky. Researchers are finding that artificial light at night may be having drastic consequences on firefly mating rituals. “Artificial light drowns out the firefly’s courtship signal,” explains Avalon Owens, an entomologist and researcher at Harvard’s Rowland Institute.
Owens is working to understand just how much of an impact artificial light at night may be having on firefly mating success. When artificial light is present in a firefly habitat, they are less able to distinguish that light from the glow of a potential mate. Less overall mating success could cause sharp population declines, and this is what has experts worried. She says doing anything and everything we can to limit artificial light at night will aid in minimizing the harm to fireflies, and that much of the problem is from lights being on when no one is using them. “For millions of years the night has been dark. Life on earth has evolved around the cycle of night and day,” said Owens, “If we could just solve lights on when people aren’t there, then I think 90% of the problem would be eliminated instantly.”
With scientists lacking data on firefly populations, much of the evidence for their decline is anecdotal. People just aren’t seeing fireflies where they used to. It’s important to remember that while fireflies exhibit their courtship display in the summer, they are still around the rest of the year. Our activities and landscape practices may be putting them at risk. Fireflies prefer a moist environment and tend to live in meadows and forests, but these habitats are increasingly being lost to human development.
Habitat is extremely important to fireflies. Fireflies spend up to 95% of their life in the larval stage. Larvae require 1-2 years to grow into adults and depend on an undisturbed habitat consisting of leaf litter, rotten logs and moist soil. Ben Pfeiffer is the founder of Firefly Conservation and Research, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing awareness and bringing to light the plight of the firefly in the United States. He says there is now empirical evidence to support the shrinking number of fireflies in the US and the main cause of their decline is loss of habitat. “A lot of previously rural areas are going through a land conversion process,” said Pfeiffer, “They’re going from agricultural or wild habitats to subdivisions or commercial developments.”
Every species has a role to play and contributes to a healthy and functioning ecosystem. Fireflies play a key role in the food chain, feeding on populations of invertebrates like snails and slugs and serving as grub for species like spiders and frogs. Fireflies also contribute to healthy soil; they burrow into the ground allowing sunlight and water to penetrate below (Indiana Department of Natural Resources).
Fireflies can persist in more urbanized areas as long as they have sufficient undisturbed habitat. O’Shea’s office is located on Damen Avenue in a neighborhood with a mix of residential properties, businesses and restaurants. As he walks around the block, he notices the unique urban ecology of downtown Chicago. Some properties are lined with a fake turf instead of grass, others are decorated with plants from foreign countries and others only have enough space for a planter. “I think it's crazy that we're filling the landscape with, like mulch, and manicured lawns and injecting them with pesticides and then bringing in imported shrubs that grow well, but don't do a damn thing in terms of the ecology,” said O’Shea.
As he reaches the end of the street, O’Shea stops next to a seemingly abandoned garden alongside the street enclosed by a short metal fence only about a foot high. The abandoned garden was now filled with tall grass, weeds and other plants that sprung up once it was left unmaintained. O’Shea admired the unkempt garden, noting that it was much more beneficial for local biodiversity than some of the well-maintained gardens. O’Shea’s solution for insect habitat loss in developed areas: creating sectioned off areas that are left to grow wild similar to this garden. Letting nature take its course in designated areas would provide precious habitat for fireflies and countless other wildlife species. “If you want to have a wild and messy yard or garden, you can put something around it that indicates it was intentional,” said O’Shea, “As long as it's like an intentional mess, then I think people are more accepting of that.”
Urban environments are only growing across the globe. According to the United Nations, over 50% of the world's population now live in cities and by 2050, 70% of the earth's population will live in cities. As cities grow, they continue to encroach on wild habitats and reduce livable areas for wildlife. Cities have historically been designed as a sea of concrete with little signs of the natural environment and sparce greenspace. Designing cities that benefit humans, as well as wildlife, will be important for maintaining biodiversity into the future. O’Shea’s aim is to find unique ways to increase biodiversity in cities.
He sees it as his responsibility, whether the client is aware of it or not. O’Shea started his firm Hinterlands in 2015 and describes it as “biodiverse landscape architecture.” Depending on the scale, landscape architecture projects can be extremely costly to implement, and it can take years for an architect to see their work come to fruition in the real world. In the early days of his firm, O’Shea spent much of his time entering design competitions, working to build his unique brand of landscape architecture and expose his work to a larger audience. Design competitions give early career architects the chance for their work to be seen by seasoned architects and possibly brought to life in the real world. O’Shea describes his competition entries as “my visions for a better future.”
These designs are based solely in the theoretical realm, but O’Shea combines his knowledge of insect ecology and landscape architecture to come up with some eyebrow raising designs. Our cities are built with humans in mind first and foremost, not wildlife, but O’Shea would like to see infrastructure that does multiple things at once. In his project, The Biodiverse City, O’Shea reimagined standard streetscape elements in a way that would benefit humans and wildlife. Some of his designs include the Bee Bollard (pictured below), a street post with small holes cut out from it to provide habitat for these critical pollinators, the Bird Lamp, a streetlight with small cavities cut out in the post to provide housing for birds, and the Insect Paver, a sidewalk that allows insects to pass underneath. At this point, these are only prototypes, but O’Shea says since doing the project he has had a lot of conversations about it, especially the bee bollard. What he has learned since this project is that a city like Chicago has standard streetscape items that are installed where needed. Creating a custom 3D printed object like the bee bollard would be very expensive and currently not feasible on a large scale. “Sometimes projects like this are helpful to kind of raise awareness or generate conversation, and you don't know what the outcome is going to be,” said O’Shea.
O’Shea received an honorable mention in a 2020 contest for his project “Cicada Code” in the landscape architecture journal LA+. Similar to Chicago’s recent bird friendly ordinance, O’Shea came up with hypothetical changes to Chicago’s municipal code that benefited cicada’s, an insect that only shows up every so often but is expected to emerge in large numbers in and around Chicago in 2024. “It was to say, hey, let's take Chicago's municipal landscape ordinance and actually adjust the code so that it will mandate property managers and homeowners manage their land in such a way that it's good for cicadas,” said O’Shea.
O’Shea’s latest project is a native pollinator garden installed just this year for a residential client in Chicago. The garden serves as an ecological stepping stone for native species like the monarch butterfly and hummingbird hawk-moth. The garden is modeled after the natural woodland and prairie environment of the region and will create pollinator habitat in an area that might otherwise be devoid of these native plants. Homeowners can play a very important role in increasing insect biodiversity in urban and rural areas. For those that meet the qualifications, The National Wildlife Federation even offers homeowners and businesses the opportunity to classify their yard or garden as a certified wildlife habitat. “What I would like to see go away is just the use of plants that don't support native insects or birds,” said O’Shea, “The challenge is, how can you take natural plants, put them together in combinations that people actually think are beautiful and aesthetically striking?”
O’Shea says he will be designing for insects and biodiversity until he retires and he hopes to instill some of the same values and thought processes about the natural world in his students who may become the future of urban landscape design. O’Shea sees it as his responsibility to incorporate elements of biodiversity into his work while also staying up to date on current technology and trends. Meta’s current headset lacks the processing power to design real-world architecture projects. However, more powerful forms of VR can be used to assess projects from a unique perspective, something that student Alex Alonso keyed in on: “That’s been one of the most helpful parts, to be able to build something and then walk around and see how it looks.”
The goal of O’Shea’s firefly futures design studio was to educate students on the threats that fireflies and other insect species are facing and to inspire novel ideas in landscape design. O’Shea believes education is a critical component of making landscapes interesting or palatable to a broader audience. The worlds that O’Shea’s students designed in the metaverse are accessible to the public, and in theory, can spread awareness about firefly decline. “People aren’t necessarily anti-bug, they just aren’t thinking about these things,” said O’Shea.
Conor O'Shea. Hinterlands Urbanism and Landscape
