Urban biotic homogenization: approaches and knowledge gaps

Urbanization is restructuring ecosystems at an unprecedented pace, with complex and profound consequences for life on earth. One of the hypothesized trajectories of urban ecosystems and species communities is biotic homogenization, possibly leading to very similar species assemblages in cities across the globe. Urbanization can, however, also have the opposite effect: biotic diversification, with cities – at least on the local scale – becoming biologically more diverse, mainly as a consequence of high species introduction rates and habitat diversification. Applying the hierarchy-of-hypotheses approach, we systematically map and structure the comprehensive body of literature on the urban biotic homogenization (UBH) hypothesis, comprising 225 individual studies (i.e. tests of the hypothesis) retrieved from 145 publications. The UBH hypothesis is studied at multiple levels with a multitude of approaches and underlying assumptions. We show that UBH is generally used with two very different ...

城市化正以前所未有的速度重塑生态系统，对地球生命产生复杂且深远的影响。城市生态系统与物种群落的假说性演化轨迹之一为生物同质化（biotic homogenization），该过程或导致全球各地城市的物种组合高度相似。然而，城市化也可能产生相反效应：生物多样化（biotic diversification），即城市——至少在局域尺度上——的生物多样性得以提升，这主要源于较高的物种引入速率与生境多样化。本研究采用假说层级方法，系统梳理并结构化了关于城市生物同质化（urban biotic homogenization, UBH）假说的全部文献，该文献库涵盖从145篇出版物中提取的225项独立研究（即该假说的检验研究）。UBH假说的研究涵盖多个层级，采用了多样的研究方法与隐含假设。本研究表明，UBH通常被应用于两种截然不同的……