Abstract
Urbanization is one of the major environmental challenges facing the world today. One of its particularly pressing effects is alterations to local and regional climate through, for example, the Urban Heat Island. Such changes in conditions are likely to have an impact on the phenology of urban vegetation, which will have knock‐on implications for the role that urban green infrastructure can play in delivering multiple ecosystem services. Here, in a human‐dominated region, we undertake an explicit comparison of vegetation phenology between urban and rural zones. Using satellite‐derived MODIS‐EVI data from the first decade of the 20th century, we extract metrics of vegetation phenology (date of start of growing season, date of end of growing season, and length of season) for Britain's 15 largest cities and their rural surrounds. On average, urban areas experienced a growing season 8.8 days longer than surrounding rural zones. As would be expected, there was a significant decline in growing season length with latitude (by 3.4 and 2.4 days/degree latitude in rural and urban areas respectively). Although there is considerable variability in how phenology in urban and rural areas differs across our study cities, we found no evidence that built urban form influences the start, end, or length of the growing season. However, the difference in the length of the growing season between rural and urban areas was significantly negatively associated with the mean disposable household income for a city. Vegetation in urban areas deliver many ecosystem services such as temperature mitigation, pollution removal, carbon uptake and storage, the provision of amenity value for humans and habitat for biodiversity. Given the rapid pace of urbanization and ongoing climate change, understanding how vegetation phenology will alter in the future is important if we wish to be able to manage urban greenspaces effectively.
Highlights
Urbanization and climate change are two of the major environmental challenges facing the world today
Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Much of the variability can be explained by the geographic location of the cities (Table 1), with the growing season estimated as being 17.6 and 12.5 days longer in rural and urban areas, respectively, for the lowest compared to the highest latitude (Fig. 4C)
Summary
Urbanization and climate change are two of the major environmental challenges facing the world today. Determining the broad swathe of consequences of climate change on species, communities and ecosystems have been the leading focus of research in recent decades (e.g., Bunn 2009). One of the most well-documented impacts has been the extension of the growing season for plants in temperate regions (e.g., Menzel and Fabian 1999; Noormets 2009). During the latter half of the 20th century, at mid- and high latitudes, a shift towards an earlier onset of spring and later autumn has been widely observed (Steltzer and Post 2009 and references therein).
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