Urban farms are biodiversity hot spots in a South African township

With global biodiversity declining rapidly, urban areas are increasingly recognized as potential refuges for biological conservation. However, few studies informing our understanding of opportunities for increasing urban biodiversity have come from poorer areas of Global South cities, a knowledge gap potentially obscuring conservation priorities and furthering environmental inequities. Here, we present results from plant surveys on 5 urban farms and 5 vacant lots in Khayelitsha, a poor, almost exclusively Black African area near Cape Town, South Africa. We identified 197 species and found significant differences between land use types, with urban farms having on average ~ 3.5x higher plant species richness than vacant lots. Richness differences were driven by the higher numbers of both native and non-native species on urban farms. Species richness was still ~ 2.4x higher on farms than on lots after removing crop species from the analysis. In addition, community composition showed clear separation between land use types using NMDS ordination in analyses of all species, of native species only, and with crop species excluded. Multivariate dispersion also differed between land use types, with much less variation in community composition among lots than among farms. These results suggest that in poor areas of sub-Saharan African cities 1) biodiversity levels are not uniformly low, 2) urban farms can provide significant ecological benefits to complement their documented social and economic benefits, and 3) food production need not tradeoff with biodiversity protection. Investments to support urban farms in these areas could thus provide broad community benefits. Data Accessibility : All data presented in this paper has been uploaded to Dryad (DOI: 10.5061/dryad.8kprr4z2m)