Towards sustainable cities: native plants on experimental rooftops promote higher insect abundance than exotics

FENOGLIO, M.S.; TAVELLA, J.; BECACCECE, H.; MORENO, M.; SALVO, A.; FABIAN, D.; ESTALLO, E.; CALVIÑO, ANA

Congreso; ESA2020: Understanding Ecological Extremes: Mechanisms of Resilience and Recovery; 2020

As urbanization continues growing, green roofs design emerges as a promising alternative to enhance plants and animals within cities. The scarce evidence available, nevertheless, gives no clear advantage of plants? origin on insect abundance. By using an experimental approach where the origin of the plant species (native-exotic) was manipulated across an urbanization gradient, we evaluated their efficiency as surrogate habitats for insects in Cordoba city, central Argentina. To do so we installed, in each of 30 houses, two blocks of a modular extensive green roof system (3m2each), with either native or exotic plant species (6 species each). In March 2019 we used pan yellow traps to sample insects, whereas the level of urbanization of each house was estimated by using NDVI and surface temperature in a buffer of 400m. A total of 9024 insects from 10 taxonomic orders were registered, being Diptera (40%), Hymenoptera (21%), Hemiptera (21%) and Thysanoptera (14%) the dominant groups. We found a significant effect (χ2=11.58; p