Darling Lindsay

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Darling
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Lindsay
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  • Article
    Continental-scale homogenization of residential lawn plant communities
    (Elsevier, 2017-05-20) Wheeler, Megan M. ; Neill, Christopher ; Groffman, Peter M. ; Avolio, Meghan L. ; Bettez, Neil D. ; Cavender-Bares, Jeannine ; Roy Chowdhury, Rinku ; Darling, Lindsay ; Grove, J. Morgan ; Hall, Sharon J. ; Heffernan, James B. ; Hobbie, Sarah E. ; Larson, Kelli L. ; Morse, Jennifer L. ; Nelson, Kristen ; Ogden, Laura ; O'Neil-Dunne, Jarlath ; Pataki, Diane E. ; Trammell, Tara
    Residential lawns are highly managed ecosystems that occur in urbanized landscapes across the United States. Because they are ubiquitous, lawns are good systems in which to study the potential homogenizing effects of urban land use and management together with the continental-scale effects of climate on ecosystem structure and functioning. We hypothesized that similar homeowner preferences and management in residential areas across the United States would lead to low plant species diversity in lawns and relatively homogeneous vegetation across broad geographical regions. We also hypothesized that lawn plant species richness would increase with regional temperature and precipitation due to the presence of spontaneous, weedy vegetation, but would decrease with household income and fertilizer use. To test these predictions, we compared plant species composition and richness in residential lawns in seven U.S. metropolitan regions. We also compared species composition in lawns with understory vegetation in minimally-managed reference areas in each city. As expected, the composition of cultivated turfgrasses was more similar among lawns than among reference areas, but this pattern also held among spontaneous species. Plant species richness and diversity varied more among lawns than among reference areas, and more diverse lawns occurred in metropolitan areas with higher precipitation. Native forb diversity increased with precipitation and decreased with income, driving overall lawn diversity trends with these predictors as well. Our results showed that both management and regional climate shaped lawn species composition, but the overall homogeneity of species regardless of regional context strongly suggested that management was a more important driver.
  • Article
    Homogenization of plant diversity, composition, and structure in North American urban yards
    (John Wiley & Sons, 2018-02-15) Pearse, William D. ; Cavender-Bares, Jeannine ; Hobbie, Sarah E. ; Avolio, Meghan L. ; Bettez, Neil D. ; Roy Chowdhury, Rinku ; Darling, Lindsay ; Groffman, Peter M. ; Grove, J. Morgan ; Hall, Sharon J. ; Heffernan, James B. ; Learned, Jennifer ; Neill, Christopher ; Nelson, Kristen ; Pataki, Diane E. ; Ruddell, Benjamin L. ; Steele, Meredith K. ; Trammell, Tara
    Urban ecosystems are widely hypothesized to be more ecologically homogeneous than natural ecosystems. We argue that urban plant communities assemble from a complex mix of horticultural and regional species pools, and evaluate the homogenization hypothesis by comparing cultivated and spontaneously occurring urban vegetation to natural area vegetation across seven major U.S. cities. There was limited support for homogenization of urban diversity, as the cultivated and spontaneous yard flora had greater numbers of species than natural areas, and cultivated phylogenetic diversity was also greater. However, urban yards showed evidence of homogenization of composition and structure. Yards were compositionally more similar across regions than were natural areas, and tree density was less variable in yards than in comparable natural areas. This homogenization of biodiversity likely reflects similar horticultural source pools, homeowner preferences, and management practices across U.S. cities.