Community gardens and urban farms positively affect biodiversity, local ecosystems, and the well-being of people that work in them, a new study shows.<\/p>
Traditionally, it has been assumed that cultivating food leads to a loss of biodiversity and negative impacts on an ecosystem.<\/p>
For the study, researchers looked at 28 urban community gardens across California over five years and quantified biodiversity in plant and animal life, as well as ecosystem functions such as pollination, carbon sequestration, food production, pest control, and\u00a0human well-being<\/a>.<\/p> \u201cWe wanted to determine if there were any tradeoffs in terms of biodiversity or impacts on ecosystem function,\u201d says Shalene Jha, an associate professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, and lead author of the study in\u00a0Ecology Letters<\/a><\/em><\/p> \u201cWhat we found is that these gardens, which are providing tremendous nutritional resources and increasing well-being for gardeners, are also supporting incredibly high levels of plant and animal biodiversity. It\u2019s a win-win.\u201d<\/p> Previous assumptions by scientists about the negative effect of food production on biodiversity have been almost entirely based on intensive rural agriculture enterprises that tend to grow only one or two types of crops, often at a massive scale.<\/p> Urban community gardens, private gardens, and urban farms and orchards tend to grow more types of plants in smaller areas. The new study is the first to explore the effects of\u00a0urban gardens<\/a>\u00a0across a wide range of biodiversity measures and ecological services.<\/p> \u201cIt\u2019s estimated that by 2030, about 60% of the world\u2019s population will live in\u00a0cities<\/a>,\u201d Jha says. \u201cAnd urban farms and gardens currently provide about 15%-20% of our food supply, so they are essential in addressing food inequality challenges. What we\u2019re seeing is that urban gardens present a critical opportunity to both support biodiversity and local food production.\u201d<\/p>","excerpt":"Community gardens and urban farms are good for biodiversity and ecosystems. They also benefit the well-being of people that work in them.","byline":"","author":"Josh Wojcik","author_bio":null,"author_img_url":null,"publisher":"Futurity","type":"post","image":null,"gc_medium_image":"https:\/\/cdn.www.hbhuluo.com\/images\/categories\/featured-category-human-services.jpg","has_featured_image":false,"img_alt":"","img_caption":"","gc_selection":false,"url":"\/\/www.hbhuluo.com\/article\/the-environmental-benefits-of-community-gardens","is_gc_original":false,"is_evergreen":false,"footnotes":null,"audio":false,"pdf":null,"video":false,"date_added":"Feb 9, 2023","date_modified":"Feb 9, 2023","categories":[{"id":54,"name":"Human Services","slug":"human-services"},{"id":55,"name":"Food and Nutrition","slug":"food-and-nutrition"},{"id":58,"name":"Environment","slug":"environment"},{"id":110,"name":"Region","slug":"region"},{"id":111,"name":"North America","slug":"north-america"},{"id":36779,"name":"Environment (Other)","slug":"environment-environment"}],"_date_added":1675900800,"_date_modified":1675900800,"_categories":["human-services","food-and-nutrition","environment","region","north-america","environment-environment"],"_tags":[]},{"id":214679,"title":"Lack of Diversity in Clinical Trials is Leaving Women and Patients of Color Behind and Harming the Future of Medicine","summary":" Its a great day when you find a piece of clothing that fits perfectly. A good shirt, the right pair of shoes or a well-cut dress is comfortable, looks nice and feels like it was made just for you. Now imagine a world where every shirt was the same size, every shoe was the same design and there weren\u2019t even differences between the cut of men\u2019s and women\u2019s clothing. Getting dressed in the morning would be clunky, and clothes would be uncomfortable. In other words, one size does not fit all.<\/p> Yet, this lack of bespoke options is more or less the reality of medicine today. Despite the many biological differences between people of different genders, races, ages and life histories, chances are that if two people walk into a doctor\u2019s office with the same symptoms, they are going to get roughly the same treatment. As you can imagine, a whole range of treatments \u2013 from drugs to testing \u2013 could be much more effective if they were designed to work with many different kinds of bodies, not just some abstract, generic human.<\/p> In this episode of The Conversation Weekly<\/a> podcast, we speak to three researchers who are looking at ways to make medicine better suited to you. It starts with simply making sure that clinical trial participants look like the actual population of patients a drug is meant to treat. And as we explore in this episode, in the future, precision medicine could help each person get medical care that is tailored to their own biology<\/a>, just like a custom shirt.<\/p> In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released a set of policy guidelines that explicitly banned \u201cwomen of childbearing age\u201d from participating in clinical trials<\/a> of new drugs. Though done out of a fear of causing birth defects, the result was that for more than a decade, new drugs were going to market with little information about how they might affect women. Due to systemic biases, research has found that people of color are routinely underrepresented in clinical trials today, too. For the most part, medical research has been done on healthy, young and middle-aged men of European descent<\/a>.<\/p> This is a problem in the U.S, according to Jennifer Miller, a bioethicist at Yale University<\/a>. \u201cIf you\u2019re not included in the trial, this raises questions about whether the drug\u2019s safety and efficacy information applies to patients like you,\u201d she says.<\/p> In recent years, a number of researchers across the U.S. \u2013 like Julia Liu<\/a>, a professor of medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine \u2013 have been trying to figure out ways to improve the diversity of clinical trial participants. Part of the problem, Liu explains, stems from a myth within medicine that Black people don\u2019t like to participate in medical research due to the history of abuses the U.S. medical system has inflicted on African Americans, like the infamous Tuskegee Experiment. But when Liu began running her own trials on a new prostate cancer test at a hospital that serves a majority-African American population, she found quite the opposite<\/a>.<\/p> \u201cIt turned out that just about everyone I asked said, \u2018I would love to do that,\u2019\u201d explains Liu. \u201cHalf of the eligible patients agreed.\u201d Black patients were just as eager to participate in research as white patients, and according to Liu, a big reason for lack of diversity in clinical trials is that they are mostly run out research hospitals in wealthier, whiter cities, not out of hospitals with diverse patients.<\/p> According to Miller\u2019s research, only 4% of trials in recent years used a representative population<\/a>, but she is optimistic. Women are now much better represented in trials, and with regard to equal racial representation, \u201cthat 4% does tell us is that it\u2019s possible to get this right.\u201d<\/p> Efforts like those of Liu and Miller are similar to how companies make shirts in different sizes to better fit different bodies. Once researchers do this work, health care providers can choose which drugs are likely to work better and have fewer risks for different patients based on their individual demographics.<\/p> Better representation is a start, but anyone who has been lucky enough to get custom-made clothing knows just how well a shirt can really fit. This is the idea behind precision medicine. According to Keith Yamamoto<\/a>, who directs the precision medicine center at the University of California, San Francisco, in the U.S., in the near future it may be possible to \u201cachieve an understanding of health and disease to the extent that we could give advice to Dan Merino, not just people like Dan.\u201d<\/p> This approach to medicine would incorporate basic biology, a person\u2019s individual genetics and life history and the wealth of all existing medical research \u2013 precision medicine is an information and computation problem. To work, it needs good data \u2013 the representative data missing from clinical trials. As Yamamoto said, \u201cPrecision medicine will fail if we don\u2019t address those issues in a head-on way.\u201d<\/p> Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly<\/a> to find out more.<\/p> This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Katie Flood. It was written by Katie Flood and Daniel Merino. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens, and the theme music is by Neeta Sarl.<\/p> You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio<\/a>, on Instagram at @theconversationdotcom<\/a> or via email<\/a>. You can also sign up for The Conversation\u2019s free emails here<\/a>. A transcript of this episode will be available soon.<\/p> Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed<\/a> or find out how else to listen here<\/a>.<\/p> Daniel Merino<\/a>, Associate Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation<\/a><\/em> and Nehal El-Hadi<\/a>, Science + Technology Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p> This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>. The Conversation is a nonprofit news source dedicated to spreading ideas and expertise from academia into the public discourse.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \t