Weeds are something we’re supposed to get rid of. But, Matt Simon says if you see green spaces around the city that seem to be full of weeds, don't be so quick to remove them.
Simon is a senior staff writer for Grist. In a recent piece, he took a closer look at these so-called “informal green spaces” — from empty lots to the median of the road to the greenery that grows on the edges of sidewalks. He found they’re highly underrated by humans and important to other urban species like pollinators.
Conversation highlights
MATT SIMON: So the beauty of these "informal green spaces" is that they're — they're everywhere, and we probably haven't really noticed them just walking by them.
You could most easily define it as an unplanned sort of green space in contrast to an official city park that is managed. These are roadsides, empty lots, even smaller strips of land that might just look like weeds, might actually be hosting a good amount of biodiversity. And we just don't really notice it.
So there's been some research done about this. Talk about where we find these most in an urban landscape? Does it depend on the city or do we kind of like, can you count on finding them in certain places?
SIMON: It's really going to depend on the city? Yes. So this new research looked at Melbourne, Australia. So they went out and calculated how much of this informal green space there is. But they also brought in this anonymized cellphone data for a naturalist app. So like iNaturalist has an app where you can use your phone to identify plants and animals. So they took that data and actually were able to say, "OK, this is how much people are engaging with these informal screen spaces versus these formal spaces like parks." And I actually found that the engagement was similar. So people are stopping to notice these informal green spaces, even though they might be a little bit invisible to a lot of us.
So it's going to depend on the city. A place like Phoenix probably has a very different kind of vegetation in Melbourne, Australia. Does. Some people have more parks. They're lucky enough to have that maybe, fewer informal green spaces. But yeah, even within a city, just naturally, it just is the case that a lot of these underserved neighborhoods just don't have proper parks. It was just designed that way by the cities, unfortunately. So these informal green spaces might be particularly powerful there — that these residents can actually enjoy those in the absence of these sort of formal parks.
There's a benefit for the people who live around them, but there's also this really interesting ecosystem question to this. These can be good for local ecosystems in various ways. Outline that for us.
SIMON: They can be very good. Very good, indeed. So what again looks to you and me like a pile of weeds is actually a thriving ecosystem. So a lot of those — I mean, hopefully a lot of those — those plants are native vegetation, and they're playing host to native pollinators. When you look at a city park, it is very often expanses of grass that are watered and mowed. You're essentially obliterated that ecosystem every time you mow it. These more unkempt informal sorts of green spaces have these thriving ecosystems. And it can actually have been thriving for decades at a time.
They ... point out in this research that along railways, you get a lot of the sort of vegetation that isn't really managed Other than keeping trees falling on the tracks, of course. Also the sorts of strips of land underneath high-voltage power lines, that could be growing for a very, very long time, and playing host of these really mature ecosystems. Where over the course of the seasons, you get certain plants growing, certain flowers flowering. That comes and goes of the season, it brings in pollinators and other species. It's just — it's a really dynamic place.
And I think that's why there are so many people who are walking by them, noticing these things and taking pictures with their phones for scientists to later find and make these really interesting findings.
