Rei Scampavia Leads Pollinator Workshop at Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm

Ready, Net, Go!

On July 8, 2025, WRA entomologist Rei Scampavia, PhD, led a half-day pollinator workshop at Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm, as part of the Orchards for All! Gleaners Program. Urban Tilth is a Richmond, California-based nonprofit that inspires, hires, and trains local residents to cultivate agriculture, feed the community, and restore relationships to the land to build a more sustainable food system within a just and healthier community. The program hosts 4 to 8 Richmond-based young adults as apprentices each year through a 6-week program that provides hands-on experience with fruit tree care, environmental justice, food justice, storytelling, and food sovereignty while working alongside Urban Tilth staff to steward the land and cultivate resources for the local community.

Rei’s pollinator workshop focused on pollinator diversity, importance, and declines, managing orchards for pollinators, and practical tactics to create and improve pollinator habitat in a heavily urbanised landscape. During the hand-on portion of the course, Rei was joined by WRA biologist Daniel Elting for a crash course in pollinator identification. Rei and Daniel also guided the students in an exercise to score pollinator habitat quality on the North Richmond Farm, including brainstorming opportunities for improvement.

Rei Scampavia is a biologist at WRA with over 17 years of experience studying, monitoring, restoring, and exploring California’s diverse ecosystems. At WRA, she conducts surveys, habitat assessments, and monitoring for protected invertebrate and native pollinator species, and provides habitat enhancement recommendations for projects with a pollinator habitat component. Her doctoral dissertation assessed the impacts of agricultural intensification on native and managed bee reproduction in the California Central Valley.