CyrusOne proactively works to support biodiversity in the areas where we operate – we want to be good neighbors to the community and nature alike! Protecting biodiversity requires building habitats where native wildlife can thrive. But doing so takes time as we convert existing landscapes and plan new ones.

Our journey began at our facility in Dublin where our new building landscaping supports local pollinators as a part of DC for Bees. For more information on this effort please go back to our earlier Blog post. Since then, we brought our attention across the pond to some of our U.S. based facilities. We started with Allen, Texas, where we converted an existing landscape into one that supports local biodiversity.  To do so, we researched Native Plant Species that could provide food, shelter, and nesting sites and designed our first habitat improvement project for a U.S. facility, installed in 2021.

But sometimes mother nature gives you a nudge, or in this case a big shove. In 2021, Winter Storm Uri tested the resiliency of our facilities across Texas, and while our operations were able to withstand the storm, our landscaping at our Carrollton facility wasn’t as resilient, with many plants dying in the extreme conditions. Sad as this might be, the silver lining is that Carrollton is only 24 miles from Allen, so it gave us an opportunity to copy-paste what we learned from Allen to Carrolton. We took our list of native Plant Species from Allen and replanted Carrollton for habitat, rather than simply replacing what was already there.

Many of our data centers are clustered geographically. This makes for easy transference of knowledge, as each cluster is likely to share the same Native Plant species, such as was the case for Allen and Carrolton! We look forward to rolling out habitat improvement projects to our other facilities to be a good neighbor to the community and nature alike, as well as keeping an eye out for opportunities (like freak winter storms) to spread our plan even faster.

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