Austin Butterfly Forum’s October General Meeting

West Texas Prairie Restoration and Arthropod Biodiversity—Lubbock Lake National Historic Landmark: A Case Study by Catherine C. Galley

Join Austin Butterfly Forum for our October general meeting, featuring Catherine C. Galley, as we learn about the importance of plant community recovery for arthropod biodiversity with an emphasis on the value of observational community science in monitoring restoration outcomes. Catherine will share a case study on a 25-year restoration project at Lubbock Lake National Historic Landmark in West Texas that transformed a mesquite/yucca landscape into short-grass prairie resulting in a large diversity of taxa among insects, spiders, and related arthropods.

This hybrid (in-person and virtual) meeting is open to the public and free to attend. Attendees are encouraged to bring food and drink to share and may arrive 15 minutes early for socialization.

Speaker Bio: Catherine C. Galley is trained as an architect, urban designer, and planner, with degrees from the École des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), École d’Architecture Paris-La Villette, Harvard University (M.Arch. in Urban Design), Rutgers University (Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy Development), and George Mason University School of Law (J.D.). She has taught at Rutgers and Texas Tech, contributed to major research on sprawl, smart growth, and regional development, and published widely on urbanism and cultural policy. Since retiring in 2015, she has reconnected with her childhood love of the natural world through iNaturalist, where she documents arthropods with the same observational curiosity that shaped her artistic and academic work.