Biodiversity+in+the+City


 * Biodiversity in Cities**

To get our discussion started, I sent out the following readings:

“Environmental services of biodiversity” Myers, N. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. 1996 Vol. 93, 2764-2769.

“Effects of urbanization on species richness: A review of plants and animals” McKinney, M. Urban Ecosystems 2008 11:262-176

And an image of nature reserve design guidelines found in “Using mathematical optimization models to design nature reserves” by Williams et al. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Vol. 2, No. 2. 2004. 98-105

From the Urban Ecology textbook:

“Island Biogeography for an Urbanizing World” by John M. Marzluff “Fauna of the Big City” by Maciej Luniak “Creating a homogeneous avifauna” by Robert Blair

George Hess then suggested two additional papers about suburban greenways:

“Avian use of greenways as stopover habitat” Kohut, S., Hess G. and Moorman C. Urban Ecosystems 2009 12: 487-502.

“Designing suburban greenways to provide habitat for forest-breeding birds” Mason, J., Moorman C., Hess, G. and Sinclair, K. Landscape and urban planning 2007 80: 153-164

We addressed the following questions in class and it’s possible that after the discussion, many of us left with more questions than answers –

> found?
 * Can cities support biodiversity?
 * What features do cities have or need to restore and support biodiversity? How do we make cities promote biodiversity?
 * Do the benefits of living in a city outweigh the benefits of being surrounded by biodiversity? Is there a tradeoff between them? Or can a balance be
 * By far, the biggest question for the group was about the importance of biodiversity in cities. Do cities need biodiversity? Why is it important and what is the cost of it? What would happen if a city had no biodiversity at all?
 * Does biodiversity have an impact in the resilience of cities? Are human and ecosystem resilience tied together?

I think we all agreed that biodiversity was difficult to sustain in cities and throughout urban sprawl, but that some (such as Austin, Texas) had managed to incorporate connectivity and environmental tourism and education into them and may serve as an example for the evolution of future cities. When discussing biodiversity we were stuck on a “good vs. bad” biodiversity discussion. Are invasive and generalist species good for the urban environment? When specialist, native species are displaced, are services being lost? At what cost? A big part of our discussion centered around this question. What is biodiversity doing for us? How can we illustrate the value of biodiversity in cities and just how much biodiversity does a city require? This was a big question with an even bigger answer, that proved very difficult to discuss in class. I’d like to encourage everyone to post their thoughts on the discussion tab of this page.

Finally, an interesting topic that came up in our discussion as a possible way of improving and “greening” cities in order to attract biodiversity – green roofs. Here’s a video found on greenroofs.com that explains the basics: [] There’s a lot of information on this page [] about how green roofs work. I’ll also start a green roofs topic in our discussion page – do you think they would work?