A new paper co-authored by Professors King and McFadden, with colleagues in Minnesota and Germany, was selected as a research highlight in the latest issue of the journal Nature. The results were recently published as a preprint in the journal Ecology. The field study by lead author Sonja Knapp, a postdoc at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Halle, Germany, compared plant diversity in residential yards along an urban-exurban gradient in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area to plant diversity in an adjacent nature reserve.
The authors found that the urbanized areas had more plant species as compared to the natural vegetation. However, the urban plant species were more closely related to each other and often shared similar functional traits such as being short-lived and fast-growing, using humans rather than insect pollinators to spread, and being adapted to high temperatures. The study raised concerns that, as plants from residential yards spread into natural areas, there could be negative effects on pollinators such as bees and butterflies and on the ability of those ecosystems to respond to environmental changes.
The article was the first publication to use data from the newly established TRY global database of plant traits maintained at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. The field study was carried out in connection with the Twin Cities Household Ecosystem Project (TCHEP), an NSF Coupled Natural and Human Systems project on which King and McFadden are PIs.
Publication: Knapp, S., Dinsmore, L., Fissore, C., Hobbie, S. E., Jakobsdottir, I., Kattge, J., King, J., Klotz, S., McFadden, J. P., and Cavender-Bares, J. 2012. Phylogenetic and functional characteristics of household yard floras and their changes along an urbanization gradient. Ecology (in press).
