Spontaneous Urban Plants

A new interactive website has been developed for New York City and its surrounding areas for tracking weeds, er, urban plants. The Spontaneous Urban Plants website (www.spontaneousurbanplants.org) contains a gallery user-generated Instagram photographs of weeds that people have found in the cities. Once they are identified, the website team assigns the positive and negative ecological services that those species have (such as wildlife habitat, heat mitigation, medicinal, erosion prevention, etc.). The website also has an interactive map of where the plants can be found. It seems to be a great educational tool for letting a community know about the value of their local ‘weeds’. Set up by the Future Green Studio in Brooklyn, the project won an Honor Award in Research from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2015.

Exotic plants are responding faster to climate change than natives in California study

The ubiquitous red clover

It seems that exotic plants are the hare to the native’s tortoise in the race for shifting climates. In a study by Wolf et al (2016) in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, the researchers studied native and exotic plant records in California to see where they were growing in response to elevation. They found that “15% of all taxa in California have ranges that have shifted upward over the past century. There are significant differences between range shifts of taxa with different naturalization statuses: 12% of endemic taxa show significant upwards range shifts, while a greater proportion (27%) of introduced taxa have shifted upward.” This is saying that introduced plants are moving upward to cooler temperatures faster than native plants. This is not surprising as many exotics, especially invasives, are adaptable to a wider range of environmental conditions than many natives. It reminds me of a story written in the 1950s by anthropologist Loren Eiseley, where he discusses taking plant seeds from the low elevations of mountains and scattering them up top, and vice versa with the upland plants. As he wrote in the story, “one never knows.”

Urban Coyotes

In 18^th century America, New Yorkers had to travel west of the Mississippi River before they first heard a coyote’s howl. Now they can hear them from home. In a remarkable story of adaptability, and despite the ample bounties upon their canine heads, eastern coyotes have successfully expanded their range to now cover most of the North American continent. Even more remarkable is that the once-shy coyote that lurked in the shadows of suburban yards and gardens, has taken an urban turn—and can now be found running through downtown plazas. Maybe this correlates to the rise in food trucks. In a study published in Urban Naturalist by Nagy, Koestner, Clemente and Weckel (2016, No. 9:1-16), the researchers found that coyotes in New York City are not only established and breeding, but within the scope of a four-year study, that they are expanding into other available greenspaces.

"2009-Coyote-Yosemite" by Yathin S Krishnappa - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2009-Coyote-Yosemite.jpg#/media/File:2009-Coyote-Yosemite.jpg"