|
Cities around the world are increasingly including green infrastructure in their policy to build « sustainable » cities due to their assumed ecological benefits. However, it is not always clear if green infrastructure delivers the ecological benefits policy claims it does. We selected an increasingly popular type of green infrastructure, green alleyways, and tested if these can provide ecological benefits in cities. To test this, we conducted ecological surveys in green alleyways in the Villeray-Saint Michel-Parc Extension neighbourhood in Montreal and in Trois-Rivieres, to assess habitat provisioning, temperature mitigation, tree abundance and diversity, vegetative complexity, and capacity for service-based traits. We worked in collaboration with teams at UdeM and UQAM, who performed qualitative interviews with residents, quantitative surveys with residents, and landscape architecture assessments of the ruelles. Overall, we found that green alleyways can provide a range of ecological benefits, but the number and capacity of these benefits highly depend on the management regime.
|
|
A diverse and resilient urban forest is important for city-wide biodiversity and can maintain ecosystem services in the face of environmental changes. Tree diversity varies across cities, in response to factors such as urban form, public and private investment, and cultural preferences, often creating inequity in access to the urban forest and the services that it offers. Historically, public tree databases have been the basis for calculating urban forest diversity and ecosystem services, yet recent studies suggest that trees on private land can differ in important ways from public ones, greatly influencing the composition of the urban forest. Our project takes into account trees on public and private land, and asks how urban forest diversity and structure changes along gradients of socioeconomic status and urban built density. In 2023, we surveyed 34,000 individual trees of 400 different species across 25 neighbourhoods spanning the island of Montreal. We also incorporated community science into our sampling efforts, allowing us to connect with residents and collect fine-scale tree data from private spaces. We used the Canadian Index of Multiple Deprivation to measure the socioeconomic status of each neighbourhood, with our study sites spanning the full scale of the index, ensuring that we included a diverse range of communities in our sampling. Project results will help us better understand the interacting factors shaping urban forest diversity across the city, and how we can reduce inequity through both public and private tree management.
|
|
Cities are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change. Urban greenspaces are important ecosystems that can conserve biodiversity and help offset the carbon footprint of urban areas. However, despite large-scale tree planting and restoration initiatives in cities, it is not known exactly where trees or vegetation should be planted or restored to achieve multiple benefits. As ecosystems with more functionally diverse bird communities are generally more resilient and better able to withstand the impacts of climate change knowledge of how bird functional richness varies in different greenspaces is an important component of building equitable and sustainable cities. Additionally, identifying areas with high carbon storage potential allows cities to better fight the effects of climate change. We considered urban greenspaces as a nature-based solutions tool for urban climate adaptations and biodiversity protection planning. Using bivariate mapping, we examined the spatial synergies and trade-offs between bird functional richness and carbon storage in ten Canadian cities. We also examined how vegetation attributes affected bird diversity and the amount of carbon. Our results show that carbon and functional richness are weakly positively correlated. Our maps highlight areas within cities where greenspaces could be managed, restored, or protected to maximize carbon storage and conserve biodiversity, and suggest that the goals of greenspace management and conservation efforts should be carefully considered before work begins, as vegetation that enhances carbon may not always match vegetation that enhances biodiversity.
|
|
Cities need urgent solutions for the twin crises of global climate change and biodiversity loss. Urban nature-based solutions are being advocated for as multi-functional tools capable of tackling these socio ecological challenges. Urban forest management is a nature-based solution with high potential to address these twin crises while also providing other benefits. For example, urban forest management for carbon climate solutions could also support biodiversity and avian conservation. However, evidence from scientific research that could support multiple outcomes remains siloed, limiting conservation, effective policy and management opportunities. We systematically mapped evidence related to the influence of urban forest management strategies on (1) avian conservation and, (2) carbon climate solutions within the global temperate region. Our findings highlight existing research gaps across scales, forest metrics (e.g., connectivity, diversity), and avian success metrics (e.g., nest success). We found a strong knowledge base for carbon climate solutions at broad-scales, such as land-use types, composition and canopy cover. We found a similarly large knowledge base for broad-scale avian metrics, mainly abundance and species richness. Finally, the most commonly used forest metrics, such as land-use type and composition, had a scale-mismatch with scale of application for both avian and carbon literature. Overall, our map guides policy makers towards areas of evidence prime for effective policy measures in addition to directing researchers to existing gaps that support urban forest management, for biodiversity enhancement and multiple benefits.
|
|
Solutions oriented work in nature-based solutions requires broad-scale thinking, urgent innovation and the coordination of multiple actors. Looking ahead, collaboration at small and large scales across a diverse set of sectors and interests is needed to improve our capacity for change. We gathered a group of over 30 stakeholders currently working in nature-based solutions (government, NGO, academia) to identify the key barriers to cross-sectoral work and to discuss the solutions needed to improve cross-sectoral collaboration and maximize the power of ideas and projects within this growing domain.
|
|
As part of a Pan-Canadian project, 14 universities are working in parallel to raise the bar of quality in the built environment. Together, these sites are developing analyses and dialogues in specific contexts that address issues that challenge current definitions of quality in the built environment. The Concordia team is focused on three aspects of quality for improving the lived experiences of aging adults in Montreal. We focus on aspects of livability, biodiversity and decarbonization using case studies across the island of Montreal.
|
The Balcony Garden project is a participatory science project exploring the potential of balconies as green space for urban biodiversity conservation. For the pilot study in 2024, we are exploring the capacity of balcony gardens to support Monarch butterflies. Therefore, we are recruiting balconies from boroughs with currently high Monarch butterfly observations in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, Le Sud-Ouest, Verdun, and Lachine. Interested balcony-owners can submit information about their balcony to see if their balcony meets the conditions for the experiment.
We will also be recruiting participants to help us test the growth of native or naturalized plant species that are also pollinator-friendly, to better understand what other pollinator plants can be grown on balconies. |
|
|
The capacity for ecosystem services in a particular neighbourhood or city is determined by many different drivers, such as tree diversity. We hypothesize that across cities, there are some common drivers, i.e., cross-city drivers, that influence the ecosystem service capacity provided by urban trees in a consistent way. Determining the cross-city drivers of ecosystem services could allow urban planners and other stakeholders to understand the ecology and plan effectively before ever planting a tree, thus contributing to an increased ability to plan healthy and equitable cities.
Our research specifically asks: What are the cross-city drivers of regulatory ecosystem service capacity across Canada? We use publicly available data to test ecosystem services and their drivers in seven cities that span a longitudinal gradient across Canada using a multi-scale, multi-service approach. We test ecological, built, and sociodemographic drivers of three ecosystem services, air temperature regulation, air pollution mitigation, and carbon storage, at a fine-scale (street level), medium-scale (neighbourhood level), and large-scale (city level) across the cities. Cities are highly dynamic and heterogeneous, varying on a uniquely fine-scale. Therefore, the capacity of the urban landscape to deliver ecosystem services is also highly spatially heterogeneous. Our multi-scale, multi-city, multi-service approach captures the importance of heterogeneity in urban landscapes and seeks to deliver greater understanding of our urban trees, and the benefits they provide urban residents. |
|
Urban forests are characterized by relationships between people and trees, where urban trees provide benefits to people and people make decisions impacting trees. People’s perceptions of urban forests are related to the cognitive processes that underpin benefits received from trees, while also influencing support for or against trees and their management. Our study builds on a previously done cross-city analysis to more deeply investigate the relationships between language, city type, and socioeconomic status with multiple perception responses associated with urban forests (i.e., values and beliefs). We conducted an online survey about urban forest perceptions in and around Montreal, allowing us to explore perceptions between regions, locations on an urban gradient and language spoken.
|
|
Cities are temporally dynamic ecosystems that experience continuous redevelopment over time. Development patterns often reflect the power structures and inequities that shape our societies. Urban parks are developed on different land-use types, and are susceptible to inequitable development patterns, past and present. Urban parks also provide critical benefits to resident wellbeing and contain natural elements that are susceptible to the effects of historical decision making.
|
|
Urban green infrastructure – the network of greenspaces across cities – provides ecosystem services that are important for urban sustainability. Because of this, cities are increasingly redeveloping underused alleys into green infrastructure to improve ecosystem service capacity. But it remains unclear if these green alleys are delivering on the promise of supplying particular ecosystem services.
|
Urban forests offer many benefits to urban residents, including climate change adaptation and mitigation. These urban forests also produce significant “wood waste”. In recent years, urban wood waste in Montreal and other North American cities has increased significantly due to global environmental change, such as an increase in ice storms and other natural events, as well as invasive insects that kill urban trees (e.g., emerald ash borer). While some of this wood waste is re-used or composted, most unfortunately goes to landfill. This material can be a large source of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change, from the collection process and throughout its life-cycle in processing. Emissions from urban forestry waste are poorly understood. For this reason, our project is interested in measuring emissions from urban forestry waste and understanding the full life-cycle of this waste in the context of current urban forestry management practices.
As part of a broader NSERC Alliance grant, our lab is investigating the stocks and flows of urban wood waste in Montreal and Quebec City. |