Abstract
The vertical surfaces of walls accommodate diverse plants in urban areas. Characterizing species composition and distribution of plants growing in these habitats is of great significance towards a better understanding and management of urban ecosystems. Here we focused on the City Wall of Nanjing (CWN), one of the biggest and best reserved ancient masonry city walls in the world. Through detailed field survey, we investigated species composition, richness and cover of the vascular plants on the CWN, and examined their relationships with a set of local habitat factors including aspect, position, height of the wall and ground vegetation status, using canonical correspondence analysis and multiple regression models. In total we found 67 plant species on the CWN. They are mostly widespread ruderal plants, with a conspicuously high proportion of vine species. Surprisingly, we found that the investigated habitat factors generally have weak correlations (R 2 < 10 %) with species composition, species richness and plant cover. The relationships remain weak when specified in different species groups in terms of life forms and seed dispersal traits. However, these species groups appear to have distinct responses to particular micro-habitat conditions such as light and intensity of human activities. Our results provide useful implications for protecting the walls and enhancing ecosystem services of their associated vegetation.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Prof. Xiansheng Shen, and Dr. Zhiyong Di at University of Science and Technology of China, and Prof. Jingbo Zhou at Anhui Vocational and Technical College of Forestry for their valuable suggestions and assistance in field survey. We also thank an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments to an earlier version of this paper. This study is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31200530, 41271197 and 31500383) and Jiangsu Committee of Science and Technology (No. BE2012765).
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Qiu, Y., Chen, B.J.W., Song, Y. et al. Composition, distribution and habitat effects of vascular plants on the vertical surfaces of an ancient city wall. Urban Ecosyst 19, 939–948 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-016-0528-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-016-0528-2