How urban gardens improve biodiversity
Meteorologist Nick Bannin spoke with Dr. Shalene Jha from the University of Texas at Austin and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center about a new study Jha collaborated on that looked at the impacts of an urban garden.
By Nick Bannin
KXAN
Feb 22, 2023
Excerpt:
Meteorologist Nick Bannin: Dr. Jha, some people think that food cultivation is bad for biodiversity and an ecosystem, but your recent study found differently, right? Can you explain?
Dr. Shalene Jha, associate professor of integrative biology at UT Austin: Sure. So this classical concept that food and biodiversity don’t get along, comes from, you know, these large-scale monoculture cultivation practices, which are often in rural areas. But what we find with urban gardening, is actually they’re extremely species-rich — so lots of plant diversity in a small area. And that really allows us to support a lot of animal biodiversity as well as food production.
Bannin: What is an urban garden?
Jha: An Urban Garden is any gardening space in an urban area that people use for food production. So it could be for herbs or vegetables or fruits; they vary in size. And so yeah, some can be, you know, the size of somebody’s backyard, or you know, even a small porch garden counts as an urban garden. But what we’re finding is that even if the garden is very small, it can have pretty major impacts in terms of supporting local biodiversity as well as producing food.
Bannin: How much food do we get from urban gardens versus the more traditional, bigger farm?
Jha: So that’s one of the reasons that we decided to pursue this study, actually. Urban gardening is contributing to larger and larger portions of the global food supply. So right now, it’s estimated that about 15-20% of the global food supply comes from urban gardens, and that proportion is just increasing.
