Assessing four methods for establishing native plants on urban vacant land
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Assessing four methods for establishing native plants on urban vacant land Elsa C. Anderson
, Emily S. Minor
Received: 4 March 2020 / Revised: 2 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 August 2020
Abstract Urban greening increases vegetation and can restore ecological functions to urban systems. It has ties to restoration ecology, which aims to return degraded land to diverse, functional ecosystems. Both practices can be applied to maximizing ecosystem services and habitat in vacant lots, which are abundant in post-industrial cities, including Chicago, Illinois (USA), where our study took place. We tested four methods for increasing native plant diversity in vacant lots, ranging from low input to resourceintensive: seed bombing, broadcast seeding, planting plugs, and gardening. After three growing seasons, we assessed the growth of eight target native species and all non-target species. We expected that intensive treatments would have more target species stems and flowers and fewer non-target species, but we found that less-intensive options often produce equal or better results. From this, we recommend broadcast seeding as a viable, low-cost method for improving habitat and biodiversity in vacant lots. Keywords Broadcast seeding Chicago Greening Native plantings Seed bombs Vacant lots
INTRODUCTION Urban greening increases abundance and cover of vegetation and has benefits for humans and wildlife (Bowler et al. 2010). Greening practices, such as planting street trees or building green roofs, vary in extent and cost (Li et al. 2005; Siwiec et al. 2018), but generally improve provisioning, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services (Li et al. 2005; Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01383-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Ko 2018; Roman et al. 2018). From this perspective, urban greening is a method to restore elements of ecological function in the novel urban ecosystem (Hobbs et al. 2009). As such, urban greening has clear ties to restoration ecology, which aims to return degraded land to diverse and functional ecosystems by reconstituting or rehabilitating land (Packard and Mutel 2005). Native plants are a common and critical element of restoration as they provide essential habitat for a wide variety of wildlife specialists and are well adapted to local climatic conditions. For these reasons, native plants are gaining traction as a focal element of urban greening (Alvey 2006). However, despite these similarities, there is not adequate cross-talk about urban greening and restoration efforts between disciplines (Vogt 2018). In this study, we blur the lines between restoration ecology and urban greening by evaluating urban greening methods with the aim of increasing native plant abundance and diversity in vacant lots. Vacant lots are common targets for urban greening (Heckert and Mennis 2012). Most post-industrial American cities have substantial vacant land, and nationally about 16% of ur
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