people are long It stirred up a rivalry between urban and rural areas with vastly different cultures and environments. But a burgeoning movement involving the field of science is eroding this divide, bringing more countries to the city. It’s called urbanization, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even lower temperatures during heatwaves.
It also overturns the long-held assumption that growing food is downright bad for biodiversity, because clearing land for agriculture requires removing native plants and animals. ecologist Shalene Jha says the idea is based on the following observations: country Industrialized maize and wheat cultivation can have devastating effects on existing ecosystems. But that’s not the case with urban farms, gardens, or even small green spaces.
In a recent paper in the journal ecology letter, Jha and her colleagues have shown that urban gardens can actually increase biodiversity, especially if residents prioritize planting native species that attract native insects such as bees. “The gardener really has a lot of power in this scenario,” says Jha. “It doesn’t matter how big or small your garden is. It is the practices of cultivating the landscape and the decisions they make about vegetation and ground cover that ultimately determine the biodiversity of the plants and animals there.”
Jha’s team characterized the biodiversity of 28 California urban gardens over five years. Far from the monotony of a single crop like a wheat field, they found a rich ecosystem thriving, which increased the diversity of species. The researchers found predators such as birds and ladybugs that prey on crop-devouring insects, which help increase yields, and abundance of bees, which benefit from crop diversity and increase plant productivity. found pollinators. This means that urban gardens produce food not only for humans, but also for other species. “In fact, they support an incredibly high level of plant and animal biodiversity,” he says.
This biodiversity is largely due to strategic trade-offs. One of his challenges of urban gardening is that it requires intensive manual labor. The combine cannot be driven around town when harvesting. But that limit turned out to be an ecological blessing. Because everything is done by hand, urban farmers can grow all kinds of plants next to each other and tightly packed for higher yields.
Another study published in the journal this month Agriculture for Sustainable DevelopmentAnother research team examined 72 urban farming sites in France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. “There is a great variety of growing spaces, often with a great variety of crops and non-food products,” said Jason Hawes, an environmental sustainability researcher at the University of Michigan and study author. says. On average, he had 20 different crops grown on the site. “A lot of people used to grow flowers for fun in their visual gardens. Community gardens are planted with flowers to make the space more welcoming,” he says. “This sort of thing contributes to the biodiversity of the area.”
