Group Members: Rami Elnajjar, Shadia Sultana, Lizmarie Delacruz
Due to rising threats to plant biodiversity in cities, our project sought to explore the correlation between the urban development of New York and plant biodiversity in the city. We categorized land sparing, or consolidated green areas, and land sharing, or distributed green areas, of the city by city council district and measured urban development by using population increases as a proxy to calculate their percent increase of urban development. We then found species data and observation statistics on iNaturalist, and graphed these two to determine the correlation between urban development and these factors, and ultimately concluded that, although weak, there is a correlation between urban development of the city and plant biodiversity.
