Measuring dendrofloristic diversity in urban parks in Novi Sad (Serbia)

Abstract

Urban parks provide many ecosystem services, and conserving biodiversity is one of the most important among them. Keeping track of biodiversity indices and their evolution over time is a useful procedure for preserving biodiversity within urban habitats. The paper presents an application of the R programming language and the R package “vegan” for calculating alpha and beta diversity indices for dendroflora in urban parks. The case study includes five major parks in the city of Novi Sad, Serbia: Danube, Futog, Kamenica, Liman and Railway park. The alpha indices calculated in the paper are the richness, Simpson, Shannon, Berger- Parker and Fisher indices, and they have been used to quantify the diversity of dendroflora in each park separately. The beta indices in this research were the Jaccard distance and Sorensen indices, and these have been used to estimate the overlap in dendrofloristic composition among parks. These analyses have been supported with additional analysis related to the dendrofloristic elements such as the ratio of native to non- native species of trees and shrubs, family spectrum, analysis of prevailing native species, abundance of invasive species, etc. This research has shown that the Danube, Futog and Kamenica parks are highly valuable from a biodiversity perspective, but also that there are distinct differences in plant composition among the five parks. This research demonstrates application of the R program in measuring dendrofloristic diversity, and creating comprehensive databases of floristic elements in urban parks. Beyond its utility for calculation purposes and processing of numerical data related to individual plant species, R can be used for the analysis of spatial data and creating maps, making its scientific applications to ecological problems even more attractive.

Keywords

• Biodiversity index
• Dendroflora
• Invasive species
• Native species
• R program
• “vegan” package