Native plants can take the heat

Tartaglia, E.S., and Aronson, M.F.J. (2024). Plant native: comparing biodiversity benefits, ecosystem services provisioning, and plant performance of native and non-native plants in urban horticulture. Urban Ecosystems 27: 2587-2611.

Written by Matthew Fertakos, edited by Bethany Bradley

Summary

Urban and suburban gardens today are supplied by a horticultural industry dominated by non-native plants. Continued propagation of non-native plants is sometimes supported by outdated  notions of their functional benefits, contributions to biodiversity, ecosystem services, and adaptive potential compared to native plants. But many individual studies have found varying levels of support for these assumptions. Tartaglia & Aronson (2024) reviews 165 papers comparing the benefits of native and non-native plants to identify their ability to support biodiversity, ecosystem services, and plant performance under urban conditions. Within these papers, 125 individual studies found that native plants outperformed non-native plants, 57 demonstrated mixed performance depending on the metric, 56 found no differences, and 26 found non-native plants outperformed native plants. Studies of the responses of native birds, bees, and other insects to native versus non-native plants made up the bulk of the papers and consistently found stronger ecological benefits associated with native plants. Overall, this study found that native plants in urban landscapes overwhelmingly correlate with higher wildlife diversity and beneficial ecosystem services. The study found little evidence to support the claim that non-native species are better adapted to urban conditions. These results illustrate that native plants in urban greenspaces support ecosystem health and function.

Take home points

• Native plant species outperform non-native plants in their ability to support biodiversity and provide ecosystem services.

• Plant performance of native species is comparable to non-native species.

• Native plant species are equally well adapted to warm and stressful conditions in urban areas as non-native plants.

Management implications

• Continue to advocate the use of primarily native plants in urban and suburban greenspaces.

• Encourage the horticultural industry to grow and supply more native plants.

• Because urban environments tend to be warmer, urban gardens can serve as an early warning system for the effects of climate change on native plants and wildlife.

Related Papers

Narango et al. 2018; Burghardt et al. 2009

Keywords: Climate-smart restoration, impact studies, native plants, ecosystem services