Are parks in NYC's wealthier areas more biodiverse? NYU researchers want to find out.

NYU researchers are counting ants, slugs and earthworms in New York City parks as part of a study to determine whether there’s a correlation between biodiversity and wealth of the surrounding neighborhood.

Ecologists Valentina Alaasam and Rafael Baez are assessing the abundance of life in the urban green spaces and comparing it to factors including education levels and average household incomes. They hope their research will help scientists understand how wealth affects urban nature, which is at the mercy of humans and their resources.

The link between wealth and biodiversity has been studied elsewhere and is referred to as the “luxury effect.” Perhaps counterintuitively, the effect can swing both ways.

Some studies indicate that with wealth comes money, manpower and know-how to help parks thrive. But the opposite can also occur, when those same resources are used to over-manicure natural landscapes, reducing biodiversity. Alaasam and Baez’s research is just getting underway with tallies of insects and birds at 10 city parks, including Prospect Park, High Bridge, Forest Park and Van Cortlandt Park.

“The luxury effects concept is this idea that in wealthier neighborhoods there's often more funding, more green space, more resources for the community that then translates into richer parks with more resources for the animals as well,” Alaasam said. She said she's uncertain about what the findings will be but added that her hunch is the project will find that parks in wealthier parts of the Big Apple have more biodiversity.

Her theory isn’t far-fetched. The city’s parks department is notoriously underfunded . The latest annual budget agreement allocates $638 million to the agency, or less than 1% of the overall municipal budget.

“For a very long time, we have had such a shoestring budget at the parks department that the last thing they’re thinking about is biodiversity,” said Adam Ganser, executive director of the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks. “They're thinking about getting the trash out of the gardens, making sure that things are safe, making sure that plants are trimmed back as much as they can, and then they're racing off to the next location.”

Ganser said city funding for parks results in a single gardener for every 114 acres of parkland. In other cities like Chicago and San Francisco, there is a gardener for every 18 acres.

That isn’t a problem for parks located in wealthier neighborhoods, where trusts and conservancies raise money and have robust and dedicated volunteer forces to pick up the slack. Central Park Conservancy raises nearly $74 million each year. In 2018, more than 3,400 volunteers did nearly 58,000 hours of work at the park.

“The vast majority of conservancies, not all of them, but the vast majority of them are in more well to do neighborhoods,” Ganser said.

A 2003 study of Arizona found that plant diversity doubled in urban areas above the median income, compared to those with earnings below the average.

“One of the factors was that rich people were able to preserve desert land’s diverse natural desert landscape because they have the money and the space to do that, and are able to afford more plants to put in,” said ecologist Diane Hope, who led the Arizona study. “If you’re down in a trailer park, the desert vegetation for the most part has already been taken out and replaced with gravel or something.”

But wealth does not always equate to a healthy and thriving park. Alaasam said preliminary findings of research focused on wealthier areas of the tropics have found reduced biodiversity through manicured landscapes and the introduction of non-native species. Hope’s study had similar findings when examining parts of Arizona that were once cultivated as farmland.

Reduced biodiversity has severe impacts on the environment and humans.

Hope said the most blaring example of the destructive effect of low biodiversity as a result of landscaping is the Monarch butterfly . The majestic insect relies on a native plant called milkweed, which has been cut down to clear for farmland, manicured lawns and gardens. The loss of the milkweed is directly related to the sharp drop in the Monarch’s numbers.

Areas with lower biodiversity affects humans’ quality of life, too. A 2022 study by the community organization South Bronx Unite found that the South Bronx was 8 degrees hotter than the Upper West Side, a wealthier neighborhood with more trees and vegetation.

“It impacts general human happiness unless you're completely unaffected by your surroundings,” said Hope. “The more diverse of an environment you have around you where you're living, I think that really impacts how you feel about life.”

The result of Alaasam and Baez’s reports will be completed by the end of the year. They hope that their data will be used by decision makers to create more equity and better manage the city’s green spaces.

“That’s the first step to conservation,” said Baez, who grew up playing in Van Cortlandt Park. “These types of [urban] ecosystems are expanding and intensifying, and what we can do about it is just spread awareness and make sure we’re developing them in ways that will nurture the wildlife that are able to survive here.”