The Homogenization of Urban Macro-systems

*This post is by Rabia Ahmed, a student in Marc's 'Causes and Consequences of Diversity' class.

If you have ever walked along a residential street in the city or suburbs you will notice many similar features in each backyard. Often times personal gardens are representative of peoples’ identities and reflect their membership in the neighbourhood. With the expansion of the urban population, an increasing area is covered by personal yards. While each homeowner views their yard to be small and therefore quite insignificant to the overall ecosystem- aggregated across the country, this area quickly adds up. 

 Despite the expansion of urban ecosystems little research has been devoted to understanding the patterns of ecosystem biodiversity, function and assembly. The findings of a recent paper by Pearse et al. (2018) investigated the extent to which “residential macro-systems” are the same across different US cities. The main focus of the paper was to compare the diversity, composition and structure of cultivated yards to the natural ecosystem in different climates across the US.

The results of the study showed that indeed the phylogenetic and species composition in yards had greater homogenization across regions compared to the corresponding natural ecosystems. There was also evidence of homogenization in vegetation as the tree density in yards remained similar across regions, despite the fact that, due to environmental filters, the tree densities in the different urban climates varied significantly. For example, the natural ecosystems in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles almost had no trees, but the tree density in the yards was well above zero.

Figure 1. The above diagram shows the convex hulls (dashed line) for three species pools: cultivated (orange), spontaneous (blue) and natural (green). The regions are abbreviated, Boston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City as BOS, BA, LA, MI, MSP, PHX, and SL, respectively. The data shows that cultivated and spontaneous pools are more similar across regions than natural area pools, and in all cases, pools in the same geographical area are more similar than pools across a geographical region.

(Retrieved from Pearse et al. 2018)

Surprisingly, however, it was found that urban vegetation whether directly planted or spontaneously growing in the yards, had greater species richness than the comparative natural areas. The greatest phylogenetic diversity (MPD) was found within the fully cultivated yards, suggesting that these species would be better suited to future climate stressors due to their evolutionary distinctiveness. This variation in species lineages provides evidence that people prefer to have a variety of plants and flowers in their backyards which are not often found in the species pool.

Overall the data suggests that similarities in land cover and residential structural characteristics lead to a decrease in microclimate divergence at a continental scale.

These results underscore the common human preference for maintaining yards that are aesthetically pleasing and low maintenance. This homogenization has broad implications as it takes effort to keep these ecosystems the same, across forests, deserts and planes. For example, it has been observed that there is little difference between the amount of irrigation and fertilizers used by homeowners in the driest (Phoenix) or the wettest (Miami) cities.

While many argue that urban and suburban habitats do not compare to natural landscapes, recent research shows that they are more biologically diverse than previously assumed. The increased biodiversity is mostly because of the fact that people plant non-native species along with the native species, and artificial maintenance is used to overcome the environmental filter. Therefore, artificially enriched environments such as yards have both positive and negative consequences on the surrounding environment. For instance, researchers at Boston University found that trees in urban yards grow twice as fast as those in nearby forests, and store carbon at a faster rate. On the other hand, it was found that the rich mulched soils in suburban yards emitted twice as much CO2 as the soil in rural forests.

In conclusion, although yards have been given diminished importance in the study of human-dominated environments, they can provide great insight into how we can make our communities more sustainable. Residents, municipalities and neighbourhood associations can help reshape their residential macro-system into a thriving eco-system one backyard at a time. The key is to keep a balance between human preferences and other organisms’ needs, thus designing landscapes that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also support pollinators and birds.

References

Groffman, Peter M., et al. “Satisfaction, water and fertilizer use in the American residential macrosystem.” Environment Research Letters, vol.11, 29 Feb. 2016, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/3/034004

Humphries, Courtney. “The Residential Macrosystem.” Anthropocene, 21 June 2017, www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2017/06/residential-macrosystem-backyard-science/.

Pearse, William D., et al. “Homogenization of Plant Diversity, Composition, and Structure in North American Urban Yards.” Ecosphere, vol. 9, no. 2, 15 Feb. 2018, doi:10.1002/ecs2.2105.