Connecting Green Spaces Within the Urban Grid

 

(Wildlife crossing, Balmori Associates)

Just how do plants and animals migrate between green spaces in urban and suburban areas? Providing adequate green corridors are always a troubling issue in community development. Urban infill and development continues to eat at most available green spaces. The extent of the problem is noticeable with amount of wildlife roadkill along highways and interstates. In Mississippi, which is a rural state, 3,400 deer-related crashes were reported by the Mississippi Highway Patrol in 2014. For years the state has remained in the top 10 national ranking of most wildlife accidents, which of course results in higher insurance premiums. Some states provide highway overpasses or underpasses in busy wildlife corridors, but many, like Mississippi, don't. Wyoming for example is spending $9.7 million to create roadway crossings for wildlife. Their main reason, they state, is safety (Transportation Nation). Wyoming Department of Transportation engineer stated "Take the $10,000 per property damage crash, and the value of deer around $3,000 based on Game and fish values, multiply that by 100 car cases and 20 or 30 property damage crashes and run that out over 20 years, and that's a significant amount of money" (Transportation Nation).

 (BIG)

A few years back, a city in Denmark looked at organizing a new development along a waterfront in the City of Holbaek that took the shape of a patchwork quilt. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the designers tried to create smaller intimate living spaces within a large area. Interestingly, they ended up with an organized series of green corridors  or ribbons that run through the dense urban space. If designed correctly, the labyrinth could provide interesting green spaces, while also providing safe wildlife corridors.

Quote of the week

"In many ways, because urban locations are so removed from forests or meadows, plantings that recall these places can be that much more pleasurable." --Thomas Rainer and Claudia West, Planting in a Post-Wild World

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"

Book Review: The Authentic Garden: Naturalistic and Contemporary Landscape Design

Quoted from The Dirt, ASLA Blog at http://dirt.asla.org/

Artfully Naturalistic Gardens

“Those familiar with naturalistic planting design, an approach that appears seemingly natural but is actually constructed, will undoubtedly recognize the names of William Robertson and Gertrude Jekyll who pioneered the style in the late-1800s. While the approach has remained popular over the last 125 years, The Authentic Garden delves into how it has evolved from the 1800s to present day. Over the centuries, two design principles came to the forefront: first, create multi-seasonal gardens and, second, make them ecological. These principles, according to the authors, have helped to ensure the naturalistic approach endures as designers adapt English traditions to their own climates.

One of the most compelling examples of this evolution is California-based Elysian Landscapes’ design for a courtyard beside an Isabel Marant store in Los Angeles, California. Using native plants adapted to the dry southwest climate, the firm formed “casual massings,” out of “loose tufts of perennials” that are bright and exotic, but subtly pay homage to a more traditional planting system. Such examples, found throughout The Authentic Garden, provide inspiration to designers in all climates.”

Published by The Monacelli Press, 2015

Urban areas reduce native wildlife biodiversity

    (Big eared townsend bat, Wikipedia, image in public domain)

Studies have shown that some wildlife species just do not adapt to urbanized areas. Marchetti (2006) and Ritzi (2004) found that there are more native fish species the farther away from urban areas, and Ordenana (2010) showed that many carnivore species decline nearer to cities. A study just published in Urban Naturalist (No. 8, 2015) supports these observations and concluded that while a few bat species can survive in urban zones, there are many more that just don’t go there. In their paper entitled Bat Species Diversity at an Urban-Rural Interface: Dominance by One Species in an Urban Area, Damm, Sparks and Whitaker (2015) determine that while Northern Long-eared Bats were caught in mist nets in urban Indianopolis, Indiana; that others include Tri-colored Bats and Little Brown Bats were negatively correlated the closer they sampled next to the urban core. They conclude that bat-species richness may be connected to specific roosting and foraging requirements, and the possible negative influence of abundant roadways.