The relationship between park size and plant biodiversity in NYC

Names: Jessica Zavalunova, Baishaki Debi, Jacob Onbreyt

Urban environments with highly fragmented spaces decrease the habitat size available to wildlife. We wanted to study the relationship between park size and plant biodiversity in an urbanized city like NYC. Studies have shown that a species-area relationship exists; as habitat size increases, the biodiversity of all organisms increases as well. We accessed park data from NYC Open Data and sorted parks into three arbitrary size ranges: “small,” “medium,” and “large.” From each of these ranges, 30 parks were randomly selected and the plant species count for each park was taken from iNaturalist. We performed linear regression and descriptive statistics analysis on these 90 parks and found that there was a moderately positive relationship between park size and plant biodiversity. As urbanization decreases greenspace, we expect to witness a decrease in biodiversity due to the positive species-area relationship we found in our study. For future work, we would like to survey these parks ourselves to accurately document the plant biodiversity of each park. We would also like to verify if there is a species-area relationship in organisms other than plants. Lastly, we might also want to study other aspects of parks such as park traffic and location and their relationship with plant biodiversity.