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--></style><title>Evidence of longer growing season in urban than
rural area</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Times">Ecology and Evolution April
2016</font></div>
<div><font face="Times"><b>DOI:</b> 10.1002/ece3.1990</font></div>
<div><font face="Times"><b><br></b></font></div>
<div><font face="Times"><b>The extent of shifts in vegetation
phenology between rural and urban areas within a human-dominated
region</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Martin Dallimer,</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Sustainability Research Institute, School of
Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Zhiyao Tang,</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Department of Ecology, College of Urban and
Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Kevin J. Gaston,</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">CEnvironment and Sustainability Institute,
University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall, UK</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Zoe G. Davies</font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology
(DICE), School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent,
Canterbury, Kent, UK</font></div>
<div><font face="Times"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Times"><b>Abstract (Free, open access
article)</b></font></div>
<div><font
face="Times">http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.1990/full</font
></div>
<div><font face="Times"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Times">Urbanization is one of the major environmental
challenges facing the world today. One of its particularly pressing
effects is alterations to local and regional climate through, for
example, the Urban Heat Island. Such changes in conditions are likely
to have an impact on the phenology of urban vegetation, which will
have knock-on implications for the role that urban green
infrastructure can play in delivering multiple ecosystem services.
Here, in a human-dominated region, we undertake an explicit comparison
of vegetation phenology between urban and rural zones. Using
satellite-derived MODIS-EVI data from the first decade of the 20th
century, we extract metrics of vegetation phenology (date of start of
growing season, date of end of growing season, and length of season)
for Britain's 15 largest cities and their rural surrounds. On average,
urban areas experienced a growing season 8.8 days longer than
surrounding rural zones. As would be expected, there was a significant
decline in growing season length with latitude (by 3.4 and
2.4 days/degree latitude in rural and urban areas respectively).
Although there is considerable variability in how phenology in urban
and rural areas differs across our study cities, we found no evidence
that built urban form influences the start, end, or length of the
growing season. However, the difference in the length of the growing
season between rural and urban areas was significantly negatively
associated with the mean disposable household income for a city.
Vegetation in urban areas deliver many ecosystem services such as
temperature mitigation, pollution removal, carbon uptake and storage,
the provision of amenity value for humans and habitat for
biodiversity. Given the rapid pace of urbanization and ongoing climate
change, understanding how vegetation phenology will alter in the
future is important if we wish to be able to manage urban greenspaces
effectively.</font></div>
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color="#000000">==================<br>
"Booms have consequences."<br>
<br>
James Grant.<i> Money of the Mind : Borrowing and Lending in America
from the Civil War to Michael Milken.</i> Farrar Straus Giroux.
1992.</font></div>
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