Assessing the extinction risk of the spontaneous flora in urban tree bases

Apolline Louvet, Clément Mantoux, Nathalie Machon

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

As the spatial arrangement of trees planted along streets in cities makes their bases potential ecological corridors for the flora, urban tree bases may be a key contributor to the overall connectivity of the urban ecosystem. However, these tree bases are also a highly fragmented environment in which extinctions are frequent. The goal of this study was to assess the plant species’ ability to survive and spread through urban tree bases. To do so, we developed a Bayesian framework to assess the extinction risk of a plant metapopulation using presence/absence data, assuming that the occupancy dynamics was described by a Hidden Markov Model. The novelty of our approach is to take into account the combined effect of low-distance dispersal and the potential presence of a seed bank on the extinction risk. We introduced a metric of the extinction risk and examined its performance over a wide range of metapopulation parameters. We applied our framework to yearly floristic inventories carried out in 1324 tree bases in Paris, France. While local extinction risks were generally high, extinction risks at the street scale varied greatly from one species to another. We identified 10 plant species that could survive and spread through urban tree bases, and three plant traits correlated with the extinction risk at the metapopulation scale: the maximal height, and the beginning and end of the flowering period. Our results suggest that some plant species can use urban tree bases as ecological corridors despite high local extinction risks by forming a seed bank. We also identified other plant traits correlated with the ability to survive in tree bases, related to the action of gardeners. Moreover, our findings demonstrate that our Bayesian estimation framework based on percolation theory has the potential to be extended to more general metapopulations.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere1012191
JournalPlos Computational Biology
Volume20
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Jun 2024

Data Availability Statement

The data supporting the findings of this study are openly available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3770339. The codes used as part of this study are openly available on GitHub at https://github.com/cmantoux/boa-process.

Funding

This work was supported by ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) \u00C9coville [ANR 14 CE22-0021]. CM acknowledges support from the \u201CInvestissements d\u2019avenir\u201D program (PRAIRIE 3IA Institute, [ANR-19-P3IA-0001]) and the European Research Council [SEQUOIA-724063]). AL acknowledges support from the Royal Society, and partial support from the chair program \u201CMathematical Modelling and Biodiversity\u201D of Veolia Environment-Ecole Polytechnique-National Museum of Natural History-Foundation X. The funders did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

FundersFunder number
Royal Society
French National Research AgencyANR-19-P3IA-0001, ANR 14 CE22-0021
French National Research Agency
European Research CouncilSEQUOIA-724063
European Research Council

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
  • Modelling and Simulation
  • Ecology
  • Molecular Biology
  • Genetics
  • Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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