Abstract
Understanding the factors that drive green space composition and richness in heterogeneous urban landscapes is critical for maintaining important ecosystem services and biodiversity. Few studies have been conducted on urban greening and plant diversity at the urban functional unit (UFU) level, although a handful of studies have explored the drivers of greening percentage and its relationships with plant richness in tropical cities. In this study, we conducted field surveys, compiled census and remote sensing data, and performed spatial analyses to investigate the interrelationship between greening percentages, plant diversity, and the socioeconomic variables of different primary and secondary UFUs in the cities of Beijing, Zhanjiang, and Haikou in China. We found that these relationships did not differ significantly between primary and secondary UFUs, and that Parks represented the largest areas of forested land, grassland, and water bodies across all three cities. Moreover, the greening percentages of all UFUs across these three cities were positively correlated with both socioeconomic variables and plant species richness. These relationships can be utilized to guide future green space planning within urban ecosystems.
Highlights
As the “green lung” of urban ecosystems [1], vegetation plays an irreplaceable role in the urban ecological environment as well as in the social functioning and well-being of the human population [2,3,4,5]
We found that the greening percentages of all urban functional unit (UFU) across all three cities were positively correlated with socioeconomic variables and species richness, which are subsequently suggested as the dominant driving forces of urban green space changes [13,23,48,49,50,51,52,53,54]
Different from previous randomly sampling, we can get the land cover and socioeconomic variables at the UFU level and explore the relationships among different components in complex urban ecosystems, for example, Parks represented the largest areas of forest land, grassland, and water bodies in Beijing, Zhanjiang, and Haikou
Summary
As the “green lung” of urban ecosystems [1], vegetation plays an irreplaceable role in the urban ecological environment as well as in the social functioning and well-being of the human population [2,3,4,5]. Exploring the coupling mechanism between urban plant diversity and both socioeconomic and natural environmental factors will aid our understanding of the spatiotemporal variation of urban vegetation patterns and the evolution of urban ecosystems. This will provide the theoretical basis and scientific support for understanding the interaction between human social and economic activities and the urban ecological environment [8,9,10]
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