Contact: Jennifer Kovacs (Agnes Scott College), Darlene Panvini (Belmont College), Bernadette Roche (Loyola University-Maryland), Wendi J.W. Williams (South Texas College)
Project E-mail: UrbanEcologyEREN@gmail.com
Initiated: 2023
Project Status: Pilot Phase (2023). Recruiting participants for Spring 2024 and beyond.
Description
Urban Ecology Project | Urbanization impacts on plant community ecological strategies: A macrosystems approach
Land use changes associated with urbanization create novel ecosystems. The characteristics of these novel urban ecosystems are expected to vary by ecoclimatic domain, as well as other environmental factors such as the magnitude of urbanization and soil type. We propose a macrosystems approach to study plant community functional strategies along an urbanization gradient across multiple ecoclimatic domains.
In this study, we ask: 1) whether plant functional strategies will change in predictable ways along a gradient of urbanization and 2) if the magnitude and direction of those changes vary according to the ecoclimatic domain and land use classification. Our approach combines the collecting, processing, and analyzing of field plant samples collected by students at field sites across the urbanization gradient. It will allow students to compare their plant community with those of nearby long-term ecological research stations and other participant locations.
Please contact project leads for access to pilot project materials, if interested.
Hypotheses/Objectives:
The objective of this study is to collect plant ecophysiological traits data about urban plant communities across an urban gradient and across a range of ecoclimatic domains.
We hypothesize that plant functional strategies will vary along an urbanization gradient, but the magnitude and direction of those changes may differ among ecoclimatic domains.
Summary of Methods:
Using the CSR theory of plant functional ecology, students will characterize the plant community of their chosen field site. In a natural-type setting near the participant’s institution, participants will lay out a 25-meter transect and collect leaves at each meter along the transect. Back in the lab, students will characterize the vegetation of their site by measuring the fresh weight (FW, mg), hydrated leaf area (LA, mm2), and oven-dried weight (DW, g) of the collected leaves. Using the spreadsheet tool, StrateFy (Pierce et al. 2017), students will convert these measured leaf ecophysiological traits into the framework of plant functional strategies of competitor (C), stress-tolerator (S), and ruderal (R), according to the CSR theory of plant functional ecology (Grime 1974). These measurements will allow students to calculate the distribution of %C, %S, and %R for the study site. Students will then be able to compare the plant traits of their chosen field site with those of the closest NEON terrestrial station to their campus or to other urban sites (either their own or from other participant sites). Additionally, other environmental variables, from field measurements and freely available tools such as ArcGIS and USDA’s Web Soil Survey, can be correlated with the CSR strategies, allowing students to generate and test their own open-ended hypotheses about urban plant communities.
Expanded Project Info.
Curriculum, Other Project Materials, & Publications will be shared here as available.