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From wildly popular to nearly forgotten, some of our cemeteries play an unexpected role in fostering biodiversity — and may provide climate solutions, too.
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. This story was originally published by The Revelator.
It happens under shadow of night: a near-silent exodus as the dark horde creeps from the chilly waters and fans out across the cemetery grounds.
Zombies?
Vampires?
Better yet, spotted salamanders. This annual migration from water to land is the culminating event for some very small residents of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It requires a vernal pool (a temporary wetland that fills with water during wet seasons) — in this case, in a natural hollow. When the ice in the vernal pool thaws each spring, the spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum) converge there to breed and lay eggs. After a couple months, the larvae metamorphose and climb back up the hill.
It’s an event celebrated by Mount Auburn staff and visitors alike.
“The spotted salamander has cover under the plants and in the leaf debris, but also in crevices in some monuments. If we weren’t a cemetery, that habitat wouldn’t be available,” says Paul Kwiatkowski, who has served as the cemetery’s full-time ecologist since 1999.
Still, the migration location is no happy accident. Mount Auburn is an exceptional place, whose ecological methods and philosophy offer a valuable blueprint for other cemeteries. And in the 21st century, some of its forward-facing focus on a healthier planet seems to be taking hold.
Habitat Islands
The ever-increasing demands of human development sometimes behave like doom-laden dominoes: Urban sprawl leads to habitat destruction leads to species extinction. So where in the world can humans coexist with biodiversity?
In cemeteries. In some urban environments, graveyards represent the last green space for miles. Increasingly ecologists are seeing how traditional cemeteries contribute to biodiversity, including some rare plant and animal species. These places illustrate the key ecological concept of habitat islands, a haven for both plants and animals being squeezed by our modern world.
Perhaps the most famous example is Vienna Central Cemetery in Austria, the second-largest cemetery in Europe. It’s the final resting place for many famous people and home to the adorable and nearly extinct European hamster (Cricetus cricetus), along with other threatened species.
And it’s not alone: A 2019 review of graveyard biodiversity identified 140 protected species in cemeteries around the world. They include several species of bats and orchids, and remnants of tallgrass prairie, one of the most endangered grassland habitat types in the world.
Marvelous Mount Auburn
In the United States, only a fraction of cemeteries have an ecological focus. These tend to be large, historic cemeteries in a handful of Northeast cities where, in the mid-1800s, churchyards gave way to rural cemeteries. Larger and wilder, they had more park-like landscaping and winding walking paths. In fact, they were often seen as the nation’s first public parks. Designed as places of meditation and succor for humans, they also offered better habitat to other species as cities encroached around them.
Mount Auburn Cemetery was the first in the United States to embrace that park-like design nearly 200 years ago, becoming a new type of public space. Today it is one of the oldest and most popular cemeteries in the country. It’s huge — 175 acres — which may help explain how it employs a full-time ecologist.
As the greater Boston area crowded around it, the cemetery allowed visitors a respite from urban life. But just as the city has continued to evolve, so has Mount Auburn.
“Our horticulture department cared for the grounds for many years in a way typical for most botanic gardens or really any urban green space,” explains Bree Harvey, its vice president of cemetery and visitor services. “For the past 30 years or so we have gone beyond that to really try to meet the needs of wildlife.”
In 2014 staff invited experts in restoration biology, herpetology, landscape design, and other fields to come together and brainstorm. For three days experts talked and walked the cemetery grounds, discussing the habitat and how to improve it.
From that came their wildlife action plan. Some goals include creating more and better pollinator habitat, improving the water quality in their numerous ponds, and reintroducing native amphibians. Since then, they’ve established breeding populations of American toads, spring peepers, and gray treefrogs. They’re also reintroducing the eastern red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus) and will eventually reintroduce some reptiles and fish, including the northern redbelly snake, musk turtle, and banded sunfish.
“I work with local faculty that specialize in different fields,” Paul says. “Today they have 16 field work projects underway. Studying birds and bats and pollinators, urban coyotes — it’s really a broad platform of studies.”
The ever-increasing demands of human development sometimes behave like doom-laden dominoes: Urban sprawl leads to habitat destruction leads to species extinction. So where in the world can humans coexist with biodiversity? In cemeteries.
Some of this work is part of national studies, such as the USA National Phenology Network, which looks at the timing of life cycle changes, and the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project. Other studies are limited to the cemetery.
“To do these things requires a lot of monitoring,” Bree says. Toward this end, they also created a citizen scientist naturalist program. Past projects include an adult dragonfly survey in 2024, a pollinator visitation survey in 2018, and an urban bat activity survey in 2017.
Mount Auburn is community-minded, and Bree says that community helps with the high level of monitoring and field science that goes on there.
“This helps our field researchers and really builds a sense of community supporting all these studies in the face of a warming climate. It opens the doors even more than our doors were open to the public before.”
With more than 200,000 visitors a year, it may seem difficult for some of these species to thrive, but nature has found a way. Take the spotted salamander migration. “It occurs on very damp evenings, when the cemetery is closed,” Paul says. “That provides the opportunity to have our project leaders lead small groups to witness the spotted salamander migration. This is a very popular activity with staff and scientists, but with the greater public as well.”
While monitoring spotted salamanders is the longest running biodiversity research project at Mount Auburn, birding has taken place since its creation in 1831. Many people from the local community have created bird lists, he says. The citizen science site eBird provides a taste of the species observed there — more than 100 species this October alone.
Then there’s the American toad. As its cemetery population has grown, so have two events each spring. First is the migration in large numbers of adult toads back to the water, to breed and lay eggs. The second event is known as the Toad Jubilee, after the eggs have hatched and metamorphosed and are emerging as toadlets, usually in early June.
“Jubilee is literally thousands upon thousands of toadlets, the size of your pinky fingernail, emerging to spread out across the cemetery,” Paul says. “The numbers are incredible, and it is so much fun to witness.” Roads close down and warning signs go up, “but the public is very supportive. And it’s added this fantastic element of it trilling to Mount Auburn.”
Owls, coyotes, foxes, have all successfully bred there, and a lot of people come to the cemetery to see them, too.
Unfortunately, not all the wildlife that visits Mount Auburn prospers. As a habitat island in the greater Boston area, one of their biggest challenges is raptors and rodenticides, Paul explains.
“We don’t put down rodenticides at Mount Auburn, but because we’re in an urban environment surrounded by so much food [restaurants, etc.], and because we’re the largest green space in the area, we’re the ones who often discover the impact of [poisons on] a hawk or owl who might eat a rat treated with rodenticide.”
It’s a sad reminder that their island can only accomplish so much.
Take climate change. They are keenly aware of the role it will play in the cemetery’s future, Paul says. Instead of fighting a losing battle, they may need to let some plants go. For example, while the sugar maple is native to their area, “we’re close to its most southern range. So as the climate warms, the sugar maple will disappear from our area except in higher elevations.”
Making Good Choices
A couple of hours up the coast, forestry expert Jessica Leahy mulls over some of the same issues. Jessica is professor of human dimensions of natural resources at the University of Maine.
“I use social science theories to address real-life natural resource problems,” she explains. Turns out, cemeteries qualify.
“Here’s an interesting real-life problem,” Jessica says. “Cemeteries have a ton of potential in influencing biodiversity, so how do we manage them for that? Cemeteries are also public spaces that can be used as demonstration areas for climate resilience. People can come there and see what happens if you plant native plants or manage for climate.”
Toward that end, she helped create a guidebook to help cemeteries in Maine support native plants, manage invasive species, and build public engagement for their efforts.
Jessica was looking to work with the Corps Network, which provides training for young people to enter careers in climate-smart agriculture and forestry through the Working Lands Climate Corps. It puts volunteers in places deemed disadvantaged for climate change, and two southern counties in Maine qualified. But while the guide is tailored to cemeteries in the Pine Tree State, its principles apply anywhere: using native plants reaps ecological benefits, provides habitat, and supports biodiversity.
The spotted salamander has cover under the plants and in the leaf debris, but also in crevices in some monuments. If we weren’t a cemetery, that habitat wouldn’t be available.
– Paul Kwiatkowski, full-time ecologist at Mount Auburn Cemetery
Wild Seed Project, a Maine-based nonprofit focused on native plant ecosystems, helped draw up the guide’s plant list, curating the native plants. And at least one endangered plant, the pink-flowered sandplain gerardia (Agalinis acuta), is featured in the guide. Listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1988, two populations endure in Maine cemeteries. Connecticut and Rhode Island’s only surviving populations live in cemeteries, too.
Jessica believes cemeteries can play an important role as demonstration sites in ecological restoration and maintenance. So what are they demonstrating?
“One focus in the guide is the defense of natural spaces from invasives,” she says. “Invasive plants are ubiquitous, they’re everywhere, but you can [eradicate them] with a lot of effort, maintain that space, and plant climate-adapted native species as well.”
Some of Maine’s cemeteries are overrun with invasives, Jessica says. Others are memorial parks, bluegrass expanses with virtually no other plants growing in them. She compares them to golf courses and acknowledges that some people may like them that way.
But even when the interest to rewild is there, it often comes down to money.
“Sometimes for rural towns in Maine, the budget is a big issue,” Jessica says. And even if you had the funds “to move an area to a more native landscaping, where would you even buy the plants?”
As a forester, there are native trees Jessica would like to protect, some threatened by invasive pests, others by climate change. “In Maine, these cemeteries have legacy trees, beautiful sugar maples and others that went in when the cemeteries began,” she explains. Now, “we’re getting very heavy rains with intense wind” that can topple the trees with one storm.
She wanted to include legacy tree management in the guide, among other information. Unfortunately, like other climate justice initiatives, Jessica’s project was cut short by the Trump administration.
“We had far more ambitions than were able to achieve … it was a real bummer. But we made the most of it.”
Silkmoth Salvation
Most cemetery biodiversity successes are thanks to mindful management at institutions like Mount Auburn. Now and then, though, benign neglect can be a species’ saving grace.
One cemetery that I visited in the rolling grasslands of southeast Arizona is so isolated that it’s nearly forgotten. A beautiful moth clings to existence there — the only U.S. location where it’s known to survive, along with two sky islands in Sonora, Mexico.
The Patagonia eyed silkmoth (Automeris patagoniensis) is dark orange, with an eyespot on each hindwing. If startled, it will flash those eyespots in the dark to scare off potential predators. But the silkmoth is rarely startled, at least by humans. The nearby town of Harshaw, once a silver-mining boomtown, hasn’t been occupied for more than 50 years, and while its cemetery is not quite abandoned, the most recent burial appears to have been in 2022.
The setting is picturesque. Thick-trunked Arizona sycamores shade the small, burbling stream that borders the cemetery. Less than half an acre in size, it holds roughly 80 graves that wind up the hillside. Since the moths like to rest in hidden, safe places during the day, it’s possible that crevices in the tombstones and between the rocks piled atop many graves provide good habitat. The hillside is also rich in grasses that the Patagonia caterpillars feed on. Afterwards, they spin their cocoons and hatch the next year, producing one brood from July to August. In late September there’s no sign of the moths, but they are nocturnal; at midday, butterflies float through the grasses instead and across a deep blue sky.
Three environmental groups (including the Center for Biological Diversity, publisher of The Revelator) sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2018 to extend endangered species protection to the moth, aware that a single fire at the wrong time in the moth’s life cycle could wipe out its final U.S. habitat. The lawsuit failed, but the imperiled moth still has one thing protecting it: a barbed-wire fence bearing two humble signs: “Harshaw Cemetery” and “Please Close Gate.”
Historically, the primary cause of habitat loss for the moth was thought to be cattle grazing. Indeed, the fence that surrounds Harshaw Cemetery may be the best reason why the moth still survives there. Free-ranging cows would like to eat the same grasses the caterpillars do, but they can’t.
Cemeteries of the Future
As society continues to evolve, so do cemeteries. Traditional burials are waning, while conservation cemeteries are on the rise. These places follow green burial practices, but they are also located on conservation land, with special easements and limited uses that protect the land and, by extension, the plants and animals that need it to survive.
“The whole philosophy is that if you’re creating a new burial ground, that over time, you’re really … helping fund what becomes conservation land,” Bree Harvey says. In parts of the country where few cemeteries like Mount Auburn exist, the focus is “not to restore something but to create a balanced ecosystem in the first place.”
Paul also sees “folks trying to revamp older or neglected cemeteries who want to create a similar environment with a balance between an active cemetery and wildlife habitat, just like we’ve done at Mount Auburn.”
“We see more and more requests from cemeteries around the country that are interested in our urban ecology work as a way to remain relevant and a place where people can convene and connect and have a sense of ownership about protecting ecology,” Bree says, “this network of cemeteries around the country that are repurposing into these urban ecosystems.”
Key Takeaways
- Cemeteries function as vital “habitat islands” in urban environments, often serving as the last remaining green spaces that foster biodiversity and protect rare or threatened species for miles.
- Mindful ecological management in cemeteries is a growing trend, with places like Mount Auburn Cemetery implementing wildlife action plans to reintroduce native amphibians, improve pollinator habitats, and conduct extensive field research and citizen science monitoring programs.
- Protecting wildlife in cemeteries comes from both active management and, in some cases, benign neglect, such as the isolated Harshaw Cemetery in Arizona, where a fence protecting native grasses for the Patagonia eyed silkmoth has been crucial.
– Bluedot Living
