Determining the Origins of Plants at a Vancouver Park to Help Preserve Urban Biodiversity

Abstract

Preserving natural biodiversity is a great way to increase ecological richness (Vila-Ruiz et al, 2014.) and to help do so, I made it my objective to determine how many plant species are native or non-native to North America in a Vancouver park. I hypothesized that if the majority of the　plants in the park I had surveyed were non-native to North America, then it was likely that other parks in the city had a majority of plants non-native to North America as well. I counted trees and individual plants by sight and used a plotless distance-based plant survey technique, the closest individual method, to determine the number of higher-density plants in the area. It was determined that the majority of the plants were not native to North America (150/244 plants). The p-value was found to be 0.9185. There was no significant difference between the native and non-native plants in Vancouver. The reasons for this are most likely due to sources of error, such as the plotless technique I used or issues in plant identification. There were a few limitations during this study such as the fall weather and park restrictions. In the end, it was found that the majority of the plants in the park were non-native to North America and this has no effect on the other parks in the city.