Abstract
Urbanization profoundly alters ecosystems, yet urban areas, home to more than half the world’s population, also support a wide range of biodiversity. Urban street trees, a crucial component of urban green space, are among the most frequently encountered green infrastructure in city environments for urban residents. Despite their vast range of benefits to urban quality of life, the taxonomic diversity and phylogenetic diversity patterns at the regional scale, and the underlying drivers, remain insufficiently understood. To address this, we explore and map geographic patterns of taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of street trees across 116 county-level cities of Yunnan province and further analyze the factors influencing these patterns. Urban street trees comprise 180 species (119 genera, 47 families), with distribution highly uneven (81 species occurring only once and 30 species in over 10 cities). We found that climatic and anthropogenic (i.e., socio-economic and urbanization metrics) factors jointly influenced taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity, with anthropogenic factors primarily driving taxonomic diversity and climatic factors dominating phylogenetic diversity. Although urban expansion can introduce more species, the phylogenetic structure of street trees is still shaped by climate. Enhancing diversity requires introducing climate-resilient species that can adapt to current and future environmental stresses.
Data availability
The data supporting the findings of this study are publicly available on figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30277585). Additionally, data are also contained in the supplementary materials.
Code availability
The code for the analysis will be publicly available on figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30277585). We ran all analyses using the software R 4.3.254.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. We would like to extend our gratitude to Tian Wu, Zhenliang Cao, Pengchen Wu, Penghui Teng, and Boxuan Jia from Kunming University for their assistance with the field survey. We also wish to thank Leng Xiushan from Beijing Forestry University for the kind help provided in the preparation of the figures. This research was funded by the Major Program for Basic Research Project of Yunnan Province (202101BC070002), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2015FY210200), the ECNU Academic Innovation Promotion Program for Excellent Doctoral Students (YBNLTS2019), and Fundamental and Interdisciplinary Disciplines Breakthrough Plan of the Ministry of Education of China (JYB2025XDXM901).
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Zhiwen Gao: field survey, data collection, analysis, interpretation and drafting the paper; Yanyi Yang, Mingming Zhuge, Xinyi Luo, Yanhong Wang, Tiyuan Xia, Yuandong Hu: field survey, collecting data and revising the paper; Kun Song and Liangjun Da: funding, conception, revising the manuscript and final approval of the paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the paper.
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Gao, Z., Yang, Y., Zhuge, M. et al. Anthropogenic Factors Dominate Taxonomic Diversity of Urban Street Trees While Climate Drives Phylogenetic Diversity. npj Urban Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00383-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00383-4
