Socioeconomics drive urban plant diversity (Hope et al. 2003)

What a cool paper (Hope et al. 2003, PNAS 100:8788-8792). Like other before and after this folks describe how the resource and non-resource effects of a keystone species (H. sapiens) is influencing plant communities. What I find so intriguing about this paper is the effect of income and all that goes with that. Obviously income is not the proximate mechanism, but I am guessing it may be a good level of aggregation for a suite of correlated effects. These more distant connections (non-reductionistic) is part of why I got into academic ecology in the first place.