City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Floral Interactions in Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx, New York Jack Henning Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/970 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] FLORAL INTERACTIONS IN VAN CORTLANDT PARK, BRONX, NEW YORK by JACK HENNING A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Biology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 © 2015 JACK HENNING All Rights Reserved. ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Biology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ___________________ __________________________________________ Date Dr. Joseph Rachlin, Lehman College Chair of Examining Committee ___________________ __________________________________________ Date Dr. Laurel Eckhardt Executive Office __________________________________________ Dr. Dwight Kincaid, Lehman College __________________________________________ Dr. Renuka Sankaran, Lehman College __________________________________________ Dr. Barbara Warkentine, State University of NY-Maritime __________________________________________ Dr. Richard Stalter, St. John’s University __________________________________________ Dr. Dominic Basile, Professor Emeritus, Lehman College Supervisory committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Floral Interactions in Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx, New York by Jack Henning Advisor: Dr. Joseph Rachlin Van Cortlandt Park is New York City’s third-largest park at 464 hectares. Despite 300 years of land-use history, this heavily impacted ecosystem shows surprising resiliency, and can act as a proxy for understanding global issues based on climate change, fragmentation, and anthropogenic impact. A park-wide inventory conducted over six years returned three times the amount of taxa observed in any prior survey suggesting the park has been historically undersampled. At 1102 species, the richness of the park supports the hypothesis that urban regions harbor greater species-richness than historically presumed. Approximately 70.6% of park listings comprise herbaceous plants. Non-natives make up 50% of the total floristic sightings, most of Eurasian or East Asian provenance. With 30 NY state-listed plants, the park represents a refugia for endangered taxa for New York State despite frequent burns, vandalism, and exotic invasion. A parsimony analysis of presence/absence data returns groupings based on species composition responding to environmental factors such as moisture, sun, and forest fragmentation. Partitioning the data set into separate herbaceous versus woody matrices suggests the two components of the flora track different life histories. Findings concur with similar results from non-metric multidimensional (NMS) ordination and unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA). Parsimony analysis of iv ecological data has use as a monitoring tool since the read-out produces a list of what taxa can be found at each site. Quantitative ecological analyses based on woody frequency data from a quadrat survey shows the three most abundant trees in the park are Prunus serotina (black cherry), Acer platanoides (Norway maple), and Quercus rubra (red oak). Importance Value analyses return the same three taxa but place Quercus rubra in first place position based on its greater diameter-at-breast height (DBH). Alpha diversity indices suggest the park is biodiverse from a woody perspective yet not necessarily even; addition of herbaceous data significantly increases diversity even more. Overall the northern end of the park is more diverse than the southern end. Disturbance specialists in the canopy of the southern park depress richness and evenness. Beta diversity analysis comparing a southern species-poor region versus a northern species-rich region shows turn-over in the park with the woody data having a higher turn-over rate than the herbaceous data. The ecology of a city environment is a suitable proxy for understanding problems putatively predicted for global warming, e.g. the influence of increased temperatures (e.g. city ‘urban island’ heat effect) and forest fragmentation on diversity. If so, results from VCP suggest richness may increase following climate warming due to non-native recruitment but long term biodiversity may change if areas are not monitored properly. Keywords: Acer platanoides , Alliaria , biodiversity, DBH, endangered plants, Endodeca , floristic survey, global warming, heavy metals, invasive plants, Jacobus Van Cortlandt, native plants, New York City Parks Department, NMS, non-native plants, novel ecosystems, parsimony, PCQ, Robert Moses, slavery, species richness, urban ecology v Acknowledgements The author wishes to express sincere gratitude to my ever patient mentor, Dr. Joseph Rachlin, for all necessary training, cladistic discussions, and support throughout my elongated stay at Lehman College. Gratitude is also expressed to Dr. Dwight Kincaid for conducting R analyses, and to all other committee members and fellow doctoral students for guidance, and encouragement. Most sincerely, I wish to thank nature, of whom I stand in awe, for a lifetime’s worth of inspiration and equanimity. “The world is indeed a wonderful place and it is good to be alive even it is only for a little while, and more than half of us do not consider our natural surroundings seriously enough ” (Davis 1892). vi Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………….. iv Acknowledgements………………………………………………… vi Table of Contents…………………………………………………... vii List of Tables……………………………………………………… x List of Figures……………………………………………………… xii List of Additional Illustrations…………………………..………… xv I. Chapter 1. General Introduction…….………………………………….... 1 1.1 Relevance of Urban Ecology………………………………… 1 1.2 Parks as a Proxy for ‘Nature’………………………………… 1 1.3 ‘Cities’ and ‘Biodiversity’ Are Not Mutually Exclusive Words 2 1.4 Exotic Non-natives……………………………………………. 3 1.5 Floristic Composition, Diversity, and Richness………………. 4 1.6 Novel Ecosystems and Tansley’s ‘Man’: a Part, or Apart from Nature………………………………………………………….. 6 1.7 Research Objectives…………………………………………… 7 II. Chapter 2. History of Van Cortlandt Park…………………………………. 9 2.1 Introduction……………………………………………………. 9 2.2 Materials and Methods………………………………………… 12 2.3 Results………………………………………………………… 14 2.4 Discussion…………………………………………………… 18 2.5 Paleohistory……………………………………………………. 18 2.6 Native American to European History………………………… 19 vii 2.7 The Van Cortlandts’ Tenure…………………………………… 22 2.8 Post-Van Cortlandts…………………………………………… 29 2.9 Recent History………………………………………………… 38 2.10 Geology of the Bronx and Its Influence on Van Cortlandt Park Soils………………………………………………………….. 42 2.11 Summary……………………………………………………… 49 III. Chapter 3. Flora of Van Cortlandt Park………….…………………….…. 51 3.1 Introduction…………………………………………………. 51 3.2 Materials and Methods……………………………………… 54 3.3 Results………………………………………………………. 60 3.4 Discussion…………………………………………………… 80 3.5 Species-richness……………………………………………….. 80 3.6 Non-native Enrichment………………………………………... 87 3.7 Community Structure and Dynamics…………………………. 91 3.8 Summary………………………………………………………. 95 IV. Chapter 4. Quantitative Ecological Analyses…………………………… 99 4.1 Introduction…………………………………………………. 99 4.2 Materials and Methods……………………………………… 104 4.3 Results………………………………………………………. 108 4.4 Discussion…………………………………………………… 140 4.5 Can’t See the Forest for the Trees…………………………….. 140 4.6 Two Sides of One Coin or Two Coins? Why Richness is not Diversity……………………………………………………… 147 viii 4.7 Turn-over…………………………………………………….. 153 4.8 Taken in toto …………………………………………………. 155 4.9 Summary……………………………………………………... 156 V. Chapter 5. Final Summary and Future Directives……………………….. 159 VI. Appendix I. Flora check list……………………………….…………........ 168 VII. Appendix II. Parsimony cladogram, NMS ordinations, collector’s curves for tree data per region, tree abundance data per region………………………….. 198 VIII. Literature Cited………………………………………………………...…. 225 ix List of Tables Chapter 2. 2.1 Morgan extractables soil analyses results…………………….............. 15 2.2 Soil texture results………………………………………………………18 Chapter 3. 3.1 Representative taxa chosen for artificial root for parsimony…………. 59 3.2 Decompositional comparison of four inventories……………………… 62 3.3 Comparison of woody versus herbaceous for four inventories……….. 63 3.4 Comparison of richness in p/a data set………………………………… 63 3.5 Richest subgrids for three data sets: complete, woody, herbaceous…… 67 3.6 Species-richness per subgrids and subunits……………………………. 71 3.7 State-listed plants found in Van Cortlandt Park……………………….. 84 Chapter 4. 4.1A-B Tree alpha diversity indices……………………………………… 112 4.2 Importance Values for top ten trees………………………………….. 120 4.3 Top ten tree taxa: rank abundance versus importance values…………. 121 4.4 Tree beta Diversity from species-poor versus species-rich regions…… 122 4.5 Alpha Diversity from species-poor versus species-rich regions……… 123 4.6 Diversity t test from species-poor versus species-rich regions……….. 124 4.7 Permutation diversity from species-poor versus species-rich regions… 127 4.8 Top ten herbaceous layer taxa from S end versus