Urbanization alters the relative importance of local and landscape factors affecting plant communities in the Tokyo megacity.

Abstract

Plant communities are impacted by local factors (related to environmental filtering) and landscape factors (related to dispersal limitation). While many studies have shown that the relative importance of these factors in understanding plant community dynamics due to urbanization, little is known about how they are altered by urbanization-a significant threat to biodiversity. This study evaluates the relative importance of local environmental (local factors), landscape, and spatial (landscape factors) variables that influence plant communities in 34 urban green spaces comprising two different habitats (forests and grasslands) along the urban-rural gradients in the Tokyo megacity, Japan. To continuously assess the relative importance of each factor along the urban-rural gradients, we extracted 1000 landscapes within a certain range that contained several sites. Subsequently, the relative importance of each factor and urbanization rate (proportion of artificial built-up area) were estimated for each landscape. Our study found that the relative importance of both local and landscape factors decreased, while that of local factor for native species in forest habitats and that of landscape factors for native species in grassland habitats increased. Collectively, these findings suggest that city size and habitat characteristics must be considered when predicting changes in plant communities caused by urbanization.