Harnessing diversity in gardens through individual decision makers

It is argued that the key to biodiversity conservation in urban gardens is developing a greater understanding of the factors driving both the positive and negative ecological outcomes of peoples’ gardening practices in ways that enhance broader ecological functioning.

Abstract

Goddard et al.'s [ 1 Goddard M. et al. Scaling up from gardens: biodiversity conservation in urban environments. Trends Ecol. Evol. 2010; 25: 90-98 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (1051) Google Scholar ] review is a welcome contribution to the study of the ecological effects of urban gardens in western developed countries. However, we disagree with their proposition that gardens should be 'managed collectively' to enhance native urban biodiversity. This may in fact be counterproductive as the very high vegetation diversity observed in gardens is the result of many individual decision makers. Instead, we argue that the key to biodiversity conservation in urban gardens is developing a greater understanding of the factors driving both the positive (high diversity) and negative (low proportion of native plants) ecological outcomes of peoples' gardening practices. Both research and practice should focus on understanding and harnessing the extraordinarily high species and structural diversity that result from current gardening practices in ways that enhance broader ecological functioning.