Vegetated roofs in boreal climate support mobile open habitat arthropods, with differentiation between meadow and succul
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Vegetated roofs in boreal climate support mobile open habitat arthropods, with differentiation between meadow and succulent roofs Kukka Kyrö 1 & D. Johan Kotze 2 & Małgorzata Anna Müllner 1 Timo Pajunen 5 & Ferenc Vilisics 6 & Susanna Lehvävirta 1,7
&
Sanja Hakala 3
&
Elöd Kondorosy 4 &
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Vegetated roofs are hoped to benefit urban wildlife, yet there are few empirical results regarding the conservation potential of such roofs. In this paper, we focus on arthropods on vegetated roofs. We vacuum sampled 17 succulent, meadow or succulentmeadow roofs, in Helsinki, Finland, and used order to species level information together with trait data to describe the communities. We evaluated the importance of biophysical roof characteristics on shaping arthropod assemblages to provide information concerning roof designs that promote rich arthropod fauna. Arthropod communities differed between the three roof types and the influence of roof variables varied between and within arthropod orders. The main local drivers of arthropod abundance across the individually analysed taxa were roof height and vegetation, with mainly positive effects of height (up to 11 m) and litter cover, and mainly negative effects of grass cover. Based on trait data from true bugs, spiders and ants, the roofs consisted mainly of common dispersive species that are generalist feeders and associated with dry open habitats or have wide habitat tolerance. We found one true bug species new to the country and assume that it arrived with imported vegetation. Based on these findings, vegetated roofs of varying height and size benefit common generalists and fauna of open dry habitats, but seem to lack rare native specialists and may introduce non-natives if imported plant material is used. Because the responses to vegetation characteristics are taxon-specific, high diversity of roof vegetation types would benefit arthropod conservation. Keywords Arthropods . Insects . Functional traits . Green roof . Nature-based solutions . Urban ecology
Introduction Urbanization threatens biodiversity at multiple spatial scales (Grimm et al. 2008; Seto et al. 2012), with a major driver of
local biodiversity loss being the conversion of natural and semi-natural areas to urban land use characterized by impervious surfaces (McKinney 2002). Loss of habitat due to urbanization is substantial: between 1992 and 2000, urban
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-020-00978-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Kukka Kyrö [email protected] 1
Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Ecosystems and Environment Research Programme, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 65, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
2
Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Ecosystems and Environment Research Programme, University of Helsinki, Niemenkatu 73, FI-15140 Lahti, Finland
3
Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Res
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