COS 162-1 - MOVED FROM THURS COS 272 - Biodiversity promotes ecosystem functioning in cities

Background/Question/Methods

The proportion of people living in urban areas is increasing globally. Thus, understanding how to manage urban biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services is increasingly important. Biodiversity has been shown to increase ecosystem functioning in natural systems. However, the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been understudied in urban areas, which differ in species compositions, abiotic environments, food webs, and turnover rates. Here, we systematically rereviewed documented evidence of biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships in urban environments and assessed factors that may influence the direction of the relationships.

Results/Conclusions

We found that biodiversity was more likely to increase ecosystem functions, especially pollination and nutrient cycling and retention, than to decrease them. Surprisingly, biodiversity was equally likely to increase or decrease biomass production and storage, perhaps due to the extensive management of plant species in urban areas. Inference type (i.e. spatial correlation vs. causal), ecosystem function, and ecosystem type were the best predictors of whether biodiversity had a positive impact on ecosystem function. However, the number of studies (n = 42) and geographic coverage of our study was too low to provide a general predictive framework for biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships in cities. We identify research gaps and opportunities to improve biodiversity-ecosystem function research in the urban realm moving forward and discuss how our findings can improve urban green space management.