The Effects of Community Gardens on Biodiversity
Group Members: Cassia Rizzo, Dylan Patel, and Zuolin Chen
(Rodriguez-Contreras, City College Seminar 3, 2020)
The construction of community gardens is generally assumed to be good for the environment, as plants absorb air pollutants and the healthy ecosystems encourage biodiversity to flourish. However, the precise environmental impacts of community gardens in New York City have been unclear. We predicted that an increase in community gardens would lead to an increase in biodiversity. However, our results did not support our hypothesis. This is in part due to our methodology. To obtain the relevant data, we found a list of locations with community gardens and used the iNaturalist app to collect observations on the appearances of bioindicators and array of species at those locations. Although there was a significant increase in the number of iNaturalist observations between the years 2010-2015 and 2015-2020, the scatter plots comparing the area of community gardens and the number of iNaturalist observations in both 2010- 2015 and 2015-2020 show that there is no correlation between these two variables. Thus, it must be concluded that the increase in the number of iNaturalist observations was caused by factors other than the increase in biodiversity brought on by community gardens. One such factor is the increase in access to technology. Between the years 2015-2020, technological devices such as smartphones became more widespread than in the years 2010-2015. This gave more residents the ability to use iNaturalist to record their observations, potentially leading to the increase in observations.
Should information on the user pool of iNaturalist be made available, engagement within a specific neighborhood can be obtained and be used to find out if more people are paying attention to the biodiversity in the area near their community gardens. This data can be used to evaluate the impact of community gardens on promoting an appreciation for green spaces in an urban area. Also, we have found that the growth of sightings and users in low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn has been among the largest, which suggest an increased community-wide awareness of biodiversity, possibly due to other initiatives and outreach efforts by non-profits or the city.
