Spontaneous Urban Ecology

Vince Eckhart, Waldo S. Walker Professor of Biology

I once heard a Grinnell alum, now a highly accomplished professor of biology at another institution, remark that “ecology” education at Grinnell used to mean driving away from campus several km to the field station (CERA), ignoring the agricultural landscape in between. The unspoken lesson seemed to be that there was no “ecology” to be done in that landscape—that ecology’s subjects (organism distribution, abundance, adaptation, and biogeochemistry) only “happen” in “natural” areas. Not so, of course.

That alum’s experience was before I arrived at Grinnell. I admit that in > 20 years of teaching ecology and other field biology courses here, most field trips in my classes are to CERA. Sometimes, though, our field trips don’t involve driving at all, not even to the farm fields.

The BIO 368 (“Ecology”) student blog posts that follow spotlight published papers on urban ecology and relate them to students’ ongoing projects, projects that address ecological questions on the Grinnell College campus. To give an example that didn’t happen, if I were studying the distribution of Platanus occidentalis (“sycamore”) seedlings on campus in fall, 2019, I might have some things to say. I might mention that 2019 followed what appeared to be a mast seeding year for P. occidentalis and impressive wind dispersal during the windy winter of 2018-2019. I might feature the recent article by Omar et al.  (2018), which showed that trees of the genus Platanus in urban areas create patches of inhospitable habitat for other “spontaneous” urban flora, possibly because their leaf litter contain inhibitory chemicals, allelopathy.

But I’m not studying that, though I want to, and I won’t describe that article, though I could. My students, however, completed the assignments like I asked them to. 

Platanus occicentalis on Grinnell’s campus, winter 2018-2019, before the snow came and seemed never to leave.

Close-up view of the carpet of seeds under the tree at left.

Omar, M., Al Sayed, N., Barré, K., Halwani, J., & Machon, N. (2018). Drivers of the distribution of spontaneous plant communities and species within urban tree bases. Urban forestry & urban greening, 35, 174-191.