PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 54: Urban Plant Communities
Tuesday, August 9, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 524 C, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Successional dynamics of the urban forest in the Phoenix metropolitan.
Walker, Jason*,1, Briggs, John1, 1 School of Life Sciences, Tempe, AZ, USA
ABSTRACT- The process of urbanization in the Phoenix metropolitan has been everything but stagnant in past decades. This is an analysis of how that process has affected current day urban forest coverage. Modern day demographic patterns of vegetation coverage are shown to correlate with metrics describing the urbanization process including an analysis of socioeconomic and housing variables. Vegetation coverage was estimated by manually digitizing high-resolution panchromatic aerial photography (1m2) from spring 1997. Over 25 km2 of different areas within the metropolitan area and surrounding desert were processed. These areas covered the full extent of 24 block groups, as defined by the federal census. Structural equation modeling was then performed and indicates that the process of urban vegetation coverage is driven by income, which affects a suite of housing factors, which in turn affects urban vegetation coverage. The final model explains over half of the variance in vegetation coverage with socioeconomics and housing variables. Analysis of vegetation coverage on other landuse types gave some interesting insights into possible mechanisms for successional dynamics of vegetation coverage throughout the process of urbanization. We use this analysis to argue that there is a predictable pattern of woody vegetation encroachment following a series of disturbance events during the process of urbanization.
Key words: urban forest, disturance, urbanization, socio-ecological system