Urbanization is seen as a threat to biodiversity within urban ecosystems, which are largely reliant on humans for their composition. Two types of extremes exist in the spectrum of urban domestic gardens; on one end, the typical urban garden which is planted by landscapers at the time the house is built and is generally left unchanged, and, at the other, a "wild" landscape planted entirely with native plants which provides habitat for native fauna and pollinators. This study assesses the plant choices made by members of organized gardening groups-the Denton County Master Gardeners (DCMG), the Elm Fork Master Naturalists (EFMN), the Trinity Forks Native Plant Society (TFNPS), and Keep Denton Beautiful (KDB)-and toward which extreme these choices put these gardens on the psectrum. TFNPS and EFMN both fall closer to the wild garden extreme, with TFNPS the closest to a "wild garden." DCMG was almost directly between the two extremes, but fell closer to the typical urban garden. By looking at how these groups manage their gardens, we begin to understand the ways in which gardeners can mitigate and soften the harsh changes between wild landscapes and urban environments. Collaboration between groups could have the potential to encourage more people to use native plants which provide habitat for native fauna and pollinators if those in the typical urban garden spectrum could find in the "wild" gardens of those on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Plant feeding insects comprise about 25% of all animal species on earth and play an important role in all ecosystems. Although we understand that their association with plants is a key-factor driving the diversification in this group, we still have large gaps in our knowledge of the underlying processes of this relationship. Female choice of host plant is an important event in the insect life-cycle, as it is a major determinant of the larval food plant. In this Thesis I studied different aspects of insect host plant choice and used butterflies from the family Nymphalidae as my study system. I found that butterflies have a well developed olfactory system and that they use odors when searching for food or host plants. However, the information obtained from the odor of host plants does not seem to be sufficient for the studied species to make a distinction between plants of different qualities. Interestingly, even when in full contact with the leaf they do not make optimal decisions. I show for example that a sub-optimal female choice may be mitigated by larval ability to cope with unfavorable situations. Moreover, species that utilize a broader set of host plants may not be very well adapted to all the hosts they use, but at the same time they may survive in areas where there is only a subset of the plants available. Lastly, differences in the evolution of life-history traits between species can account for differences in how each species realizes its lifestyle. Thus, by incorporating findings on mechanisms of host plant choice with the ecological and evolutionary context of a species, our ability to explain the dynamics of host plant choice and insect-plant interactions can be improved. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>