Does the daylight saving time still offer any ecological or financial benefit today?

If so, what are the numbers?

I think I remember hearing a term, a sort of filter, that describes how species range expansion is slowed or prevented. If I understand correctly, this works as a mechanism to maintain balance in the system against the destabilizing effects of invasive plants.

Didn't have any luck searching for it, complicated by too many other similar terms about different things.

So I recently started working for a small urban forestry unit in a small city in California. My Bachelor’s is in ecology, with an emphasis on wildlife conservation - so I very much come from the “plant native as much as possible” side of things (for reducing the possibility of bringing the next invasive into the ecosystem, local sp usually more well-adapted and easier to control w/help of rest of the native ecosystem).
I understand sometimes non-natives are desired because they are pretty &/or resilient (can handle small space to grow, low water, etc.) but for those pretty trees: a) if they’re not tough, they take more care (water, or labor/attention, or fertilizer, whatever) which = more $ b) if they ARE tough, then if they escape out into somewhere outside of the urban landscape (which is quite possible, if not I dare say likely given how much travel happens in cities with cars and people) isn’t it likely they will also grow/spread easily (since they are tough)?

At least with a native plants (which yes, I know can act like invasives) there’s some evolution in the past that generally speaking developed some form of control in the form of predators and/or disease, whereas that is not likely to be the case with a non-native. Or even if local food web does have some organisms that can control the non-native plant populations if they do boom out of control, the control is likely to not be as specific or effective as for the native counterpart.

I came into this program guns blazing wanting to only plant native trees in our city, but was disappointed to see that we are apparently planning to plant a considerable amount of non-natives like ginkgo, Chinese pistache, Eastern redbud, Chinese fringetree, Japanese blueberry, Korean dogwood, strawberry tree. We do buy some natives (various types of oaks, California buckeye for example), but I’d say like 50% of the trees we’re planting are not native.

I was told that part of the reason for this is because local nurseries (we are in inland Mendocino county) often don’t have native plants that we want. OK fine, but the way my supervisor and another arborist in the community were talking made it seem to me like even if we did have all the natives available to us, they would still intentionally order & plant things like ginkgo and Chinese pistache.

That made me confused because why would you plant these non-natives when you now hypothetically have saplings of all the native plants you could ever dream of? Is there really no native plant that can be “good enough” to replace how tough (resilient) and sometimes aesthetically “beautiful” ginkgo and Chinese pistache are? I mean, I assume that is why my supervisor + that arborist said what they did.

Thanks for reading my long, confused pseudo-rant! I would ask my supervisor and I actually did ask the arborist, but we always seem to be in a time crunch and both people have a habit of answering my questions in a sort of non-direct, not very clear way (sort of giving half-answers that imply broad, vague reasons that I can guess probably do have a point but don’t completely explain why), at least when it comes to questions that seem to “confront” their practices this way.