Green City Post AUTHOR: ALISTAIR YEOMANS. CHARTER ED FOR ESTER AND CHARTER ED HORTICU LTU RIST
CULTIVATING PLANTS FOR LANDSCAPE RESILIENCE: ARE WE WELL ENOUGH PREPARED FOR THE FUTURE?
Urban forest in northern Manhattan in Riverside Park along the Hudson River.
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o answer this key question, the horticultural industry is recommended to undertake a mapping exercise to collate and assess the knowledge, databases, and tools that are available to contribute to our ability to identify and produce plant species and cultivars that will thrive in a changing environment. Landscape resilience is a key factor in responding to future environment impacted by a changing climate, increasing numbers of plant pests and diseases, and, in certain situations, land management that falls short of best practice. Enhancing landscape resilience requires an understanding of ecological processes in modified or natural ecosystems. Either in the urban or rural setting, ecological resilience is highly dependant on biodiversity. From a biodiversity perspective, the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, leading the government to develop A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment.1 This strategy aims to protect and grow natural capital in the UK with a 25-year vision. Natural capital consists of ecosystems, which deliver a wide range of valuable services that are essential for human well-being2. Plant life is a critical component of natural capital providing humans with
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FLORACULTURE INTERNATIONAL FEBRUARY 2022
food, fibre, and fuel, and deliver a wealth of other wellbeing benefits from gardens, urban landscapes, and the countryside. We rely on a diverse range of plants to provide these ecosystem services; some species are considered native; others are introduced and include cultivars arising from plant breeding initiatives. Through agricultural, forestry, horticultural and permaculture practices, plants are grown in a range of systems from monocultures to complex assemblages. In all of these cases, we modify the landscape through selecting plant species to grow and perform certain functions. Climate modelling is a specialised area of research. Recently complex data has been packaged to be readily
REFERENCES 1.
A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment. HM Government. 2018
2.
Natural capital and ecosystem services. EEA. 2015
3.
Understanding climate change from a global analysis of city analogues. Bastin et al. 2019
4.
Climate change: What food could be grown in London in 2050? October 2020
