The Diversity of Spontaneous Plants Enhances the Resilience of Urban Green Spaces

Abstract

Urban spontaneous plant communities exhibit distinct self-succession patterns and autonomous regeneration capacities, which play a pivotal role in enhancing biodiversity, improving ecological resilience, and minimizing maintenance expenditures within urban green infrastructure systems. This investigation aims to elucidate the diversity variations of spontaneous flora across different urban green space typologies and their underlying determinants, thereby providing critical insights for optimizing ecosystem stability and sustainable management practices. This study systematically examined four characteristic green space types in Luoyang City (Henan Province, China) through standardized quadrat sampling. We conducted comprehensive analyses encompassing: species composition characteristics, species importance values, species frequency, multidimensional diversity indices, and phylogenetic diversity of spontaneous plant among different types of green spaces and their influencing factors. The results showed that the species richness and diversity index of the suburban park were the highest. The phylogenetic diversity analysis indicated that, except for the suburban park, the phylogenetic structure of spontaneous plants in other green spaces was of the aggregated type.