Abstract
Urban forests in northern Europe are threatened by climate change and biosecurity risks, and in response, city planners are urged to select a wider portfolio of tree species to mitigate the risks of species die-off. However, selecting the right species is a challenge, as most guidance available to specifiers focuses on ecosystem service delivery rather than the information most critical to tree establishment: the ability of a species to tolerate the stresses found in a given place. In this paper, we investigate the potential of using ecological techniques to describe ecological traits at the level of species selection, and the potential of functional ecology theories to identify species that are not widely discussed or specified at present but might be suitable. We collected trait data on 167 tree species across 37 genera, including 38 species within a case study genus, Magnolia L., and tested four theories that posit ways in which traits trade off against each other in predictable ways. We found that at this scale, most species recommended for urban forestry tend to be ordinated along an axis of variation describing pace of life and stress tolerance, and that most Magnolia species are described as being fast-growing rather than stress-tolerant, although there is a degree of inter-specific variation. Further, we found that only one theory offers a succinct and reliable way of describing physiological strategies but translating ecological theory into a form appropriate for urban forestry will require further work.
Highlights
It is widely acknowledged that urban forestry’s challenge of optimising the fit between a tree and a site is likely to become increasingly difficult (Conway and Vander Vecht, 2015; EsperonRodriguez et al, 2019; Núñez-Florez et al, 2019) as the rate and extent of global urban tree habitat decline is likely to be uneven under climate change (Burley et al, 2019)
There were 21 possible trait combinations of the 7 traits in this study, of which 10 show significance at p < 0.05 (Table 4). Four of these 10 significant relationships represent the same axis of variation and are not part of any of the trait schemes considered within this study
Whilst the individual trait data reflect or mediate specialised evolutionary adaptions within a specific organ and allow comparisons to be made between species, three key findings can be reported from the review of the different trait-based schemes when applied to urban forestry species selection
Summary
It is widely acknowledged that urban forestry’s challenge of optimising the fit between a tree and a site is likely to become increasingly difficult (Conway and Vander Vecht, 2015; EsperonRodriguez et al, 2019; Núñez-Florez et al, 2019) as the rate and extent of global urban tree habitat decline is likely to be uneven under climate change (Burley et al, 2019). Recent research has shown that reproductive trait trade-offs scale from cell to population (English and Bonsall, 2019), strengthening the argument that relatively simple physiological processes can be used to describe complex strategies for resource allocation and community dynamics As such, these fields hold significant potential for urban forestry, regarding species selection and for improving many other aspects of urban forest management such as the quantification of ecosystem service provision or preparing management plans
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