Over more than 6 decades, Berlin researchers have helped launch urban ecology as a discipline, producing sometimes surprising results that have helped promote conservation efforts and turn their city into one of the world’s greenest capitals. LongReads
A modest cemetery in the heart of this 3.6-million-strong capital city is hardly a likely nature haven. Yet it was here in the Domfriedhof, in Berlin’s Mitte district, that Anita Grossmann, an ecologist at the Technical University of Berlin ,in a single parched and untended patch of grasses and flowers on the graveyard’s edge.
The findings are the latest to emerge from one of the world’s longest series of studies of a city’s ecosystems. Over more than 6 decades, Berlin researchers have helped launch urban ecology as a discipline, producing sometimes surprising results that have helped promote conservation efforts and turn their city into one of the world’s greenest capitals.
Berlin’s “wastelands”—former industrial sites colonized by novel mixtures of nonnative and native species—can harbor as much biodiversity as more natural sites , researchers reported in 2017. A follow-up study published in 2019 found similar results for insects in nearly 300 forest and grassland sites. Both studies pointed the finger largely at rural land trends.
The work carried risks. When the ecologists tried to survey abandoned railyards, which were controlled by East Berlin, police sometimes chased them away, recalls ecologist Ingo Kowarik, who studied with Sukopp and later became a professor at his university.But the results justified the peril.
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