"Dormancy in urban environments"Louvet, ApollineUnderstanding the drivers of biodiversity in urban environments is an important question in urban ecology. As urban environments are very fragmented and subject to frequent disruptions, the biological traits associated to a higher survival probability are expected to differ from the ones selectively advantaged in more natural environments. The goal of this contribution is to investigate this question through the lens of dormancy. To do so, we introduce a stochastic process for plant dynamics in urban environments. We show the existence of a critical local extinction probability above which a seed bank is needed to ensure survival. Then, we make use of the theoretical results obtained to construct a "metric" of the extinction risk at the metapopulation scale. We apply our framework to a dataset of floristic inventories carried out in 1300 tree bases in Paris, France, allowing us to identify several biological traits associated to higher survival probabilities in urban tree bases. Based on a joint work with Nathalie Machon (CESCO, MNHN) and Clément Mantoux. |
« back