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Little land is left for plants, despite them providing many ecosystem services for residents. Urban areas are human-dominated spaces, consisting primarily of such anthropogenic infrastructure as buildings, roads, and leisure parks.

With the rapid acceleration of urbanization ( Brenner and Keil, 2014), more than half of the world’s population today lives and works in urban areas ( Kabisch and Haase, 2011). Thus, considering the effects of the plant characteristic and land-use type on traits is important for assessing the urban–rural gradients of plant functional traits. Leaf age was the most important factor influencing leaf nutrient traits, while land-use type was the most important factor influencing leaf morphological traits in urban environments. Importantly, there were significant differences in the urban–rural gradient of leaf functional traits between leaves of different ages, and across land-use types. Stomatal density, leaf width, and leaf P concentration increased with increasing distance from the city center, while leaf K concentration decreased with increasing distance from the city center. This implies that on roadsides, plant capacity to acquire resources (e.g., light and carbon dioxide) was degraded. Pines growing on roadsides had leaves with smaller length, width, and area, as well as lower stomatal density, compared with those growing in parks and neighborhoods. There were significant differences in the values of leaf functional traits between the needles of the current and previous year and across land-use types. In this study, we sampled the needles of Chinese pine ( Pinus tabuliformis Carr.) in areas with three land-use types (roadsides, parks, and neighborhoods) along an urban–rural gradient in Beijing, China to determine the effect of urbanization on leaf functional traits. However, considerable uncertainties remain because differences in land-use type have not frequently been taken into account when assessing the effect of urbanization on leaf traits. 6Beijing Urban Ecosystem Research Station, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, ChinaĪn increasing number of studies have focused on the response and adaptation of plants to urbanization by comparing differences in leaf functional traits between urban and rural sites.