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The Biological System: Plants in the Urban Environment

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Understanding Urban Ecology

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Abstract

This chapter reviews the importance of plants to the urban environment. It summarizes the conditions to which plants are subjected in the urban environment and some of the benefits they provide both physically through cleaning air and water and psychologically. It reviews briefly the history of urban flora studies and the most common spatial sampling designs used by researchers to document urban plant species over time. While the majority of past research has focused on taxonomic cataloging of the species found in cities, with a particular emphasis on native versus non-native, current urban plant ecology research questions revolve around the novel ecosystems being created in urban areas, evolution and physiological adaptation, and the role of human attitudes. Finally, we offer an energetics-based approach to understand species presence and absence as a function of their metabolic adaptation to multiple environmental gradients encountered across a heterogeneous urban landscape. Such knowledge, we propose, can help city planners, landscape architects, and citizens preserve urban ecosystem biotic structure and function in a changing world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This understanding of plant response along environmental gradients was first remarked upon by Theophrastus born circa 370 B.C.E., and then by Alexander Von Humboldt circa 1802, and furthered by the work of Robert Whittaker in the 1950s [61,62,63].

  2. 2.

    This is not to say that reestablishment of native species is not without benefits (see Tallamy and Shropshire [39]), only that if urban conditions do not favor those species, then it behooves us to plant those species that will thrive.

  3. 3.

    Some plant ecologists have called the ecological era of today the Homogocene claiming that there is a homogenization of biodiversity due to human alterations of the Earth and a unification of species that have long been separated around the globe. We would argue that their conclusions are based on taxa identification (lists of plant names) only and not on taxa richness, abundance, evenness, nor dominance which may argue for heterogeneity across the globe and across cities. We prefer the term Anthropocene to refer to the current era.

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Acknowledgement

Thank you to Dr. Ariel Lugo, forest ecologist, and Dr. Catherine Landis, botanist, for their thoughtful, probing, and insightful reviews that helped shape and enrich this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Studies, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Myrna H. P. Hall

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  1. Myrna H. P. Hall
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Correspondence to Myrna H. P. Hall .

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  1. Center for the Urban Environment, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Myrna H. P. Hall

  2. Office of Research and Development, Environmental Protection Agency, Narragansett, RI, USA

    Stephen B. Balogh

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Hall, M.H.P. (2019). The Biological System: Plants in the Urban Environment. In: Hall, M., Balogh, S. (eds) Understanding Urban Ecology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11259-2_11

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