Privately Owned Plants need Space: An Analysis on Plant Biodiversity in Toronto's Privately-owned Publicly Accessible Spaces

Abstract

Urban plant biodiversity is a growing ecological concern for city planners and ecologists. While parks are serviced by the public sector, and yards are pruned by the private citizen, a growing proportion of urban green space is managed by corporations. Despite biodiversity targets set by city councils and public committees, actual plant surveys have not been performed. Employing coordinate data of Privately-Owned Publicly-accessible Spaces (POPS) from the City of Toronto, we sampled plant species richness in nine corporately-managed green spaces. Using linear mixed-effect models, we compared richness with various green space characteristics and found that site area is an important predictor. Our results concur with prior studies showing that habitat area may cause significant impacts to urbanized plant biodiversity.