New York City is home to over 500 community gardens, over 80% of which host food production (GrowNYC 2010). This paper is a case study of Farming Concrete, an open, community-based study aimed to define community gardens in the context of the New York City food system and to educate local communities about developing and conducting meaningful research. The project employs citizen science methods in which the gardeners and researchers alike are involved in the design and implementation processes. This paper will outline the methods and challenges involved in conducting participatory urban agriculture research, as well as discuss findings regarding how much food was grown in NYC community gardens in 2010 and 2011.

1. Biological organisms are increasingly being introduced and eradicated in an effort to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function in the face of anthropogenic threats. However, these conservation actions can have unintended consequences to non-target species. Careful vetting of these actions using ecological modelling tools could help predict and avoid unintended consequences.2. Qualitative modelling tools, such as fuzzy interaction webs (FIWs), allow for qualitative rankings of community properties (e.g. interaction strength = high, medium, low) in combination with quantitative information to predict management outcomes. These tools have lower data requirements than strictly quantitative models, facilitating their use for communities lacking comprehensive parameterization. However, no studies have evaluated the efficacy of FIWs for predicting unintended consequences against empirically documented outcomes.Moreover, there is no process for systematically identifying which species to incorporate in community-level conservation assessments to overcome model structure uncertainty. Finally, there is a need to make qualitative modelling tools more accessible for conservation practitioners.3. We applied FIWs to the case study of lake trout introduction into Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, to assess its ability to predict documented community-level outcomes from an intentional species introduction. Next, we used the case study of the intentional red squirrel introduction to Newfoundland to show how a community assessment framework can help define the community interaction web needed for applying a FIW. Lastly, we introduced a userfriendly web interface (https://matrix.mpgra nch.com/#/) for applying FIWs to conservation questions. 4. We found that the FIW predicted previously documented directional changes in the abundance of community components relatively well in the Yellowstone Lake case study, even with minimal knowledge of the system. The community | 2323