Pop-up parks -- small green spaces with permanent or temporary fixtures -- may help urban populations connect with nature in their neighbourhoods, a study has found.
Large city parks and other undeveloped areas, commonly referred to as "greenspaces," are known to deliver numerous socioecological benefits to urban residents and wildlife.
However, skyrocketing rates of urban growth are leaving little room for the inclusion of conventional greenspaces in urban landscapes worldwide.
According to research published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, pop-up parks (PUPs) represent one possible means to help meet the demands of urbanites for more opportunities to connect with nature.
PUPs serve important conservation functions by providing small-scale habitat refuges for a wide variety of threatened plants and animals in urban environments, and they deliver a suite of ecosystem services to urban residents and wildlife alike.
The researchers from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia combined a case study with a systematic literature review of PUP-related research to explore the socioecological potential of PUPs in greater depth.
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"Our goal was to provide empirical evidence of the capacity of PUPs to deliver positive biodiversity outcomes, and in reviewing the direct or implied evidence from the literature regarding the possible social benefits of PUPs," said Luis Mata, an ecologist at RMIT.
To examine the effectiveness of PUPs on urban biodiversity directly, the researchers chose a PUP in Australia called "Grasslands," a six-week art-science collaborative project.
The study tests what effect the PUP had on insect and spider diversity at the site. Counts periodically conducted over the course of the six-week duration of the PUP reveal that insect and arthropod species richness increased markedly.
"The plant resources provided by Grasslands boosted and sustained functionally and taxonomically diverse insect and spider communities, thereby contributing to the provision of important ecosystem services like pollination, pest control, and nutrient cycling," said Mata.
Insect pollinator abundance, for example, was approximately 161 per cent higher when the planters were present.
The review of PUP-related studies provides strong evidence that even small greenspaces confer a wide variety of social benefits to urban residents, although these differ somewhat from the benefits provided by larger greenspaces.