A Critical Review of Planning for the Future of Urban Biodiversity: A Global Review of City-Scale Initiatives 

The article I chose reviewed 135 plans from 40 global cities to find commonalities and areas of improvement in urban biodiversity planning. This paper reviewed these plans from an ecological perspective focusing on biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, urban ecology is an interdisciplinary topic and a social lens can be valuable for these reviews. Because there is such a high human population in urban areas, it is impossible to plan for biodiversity values alone. This article also does not consider the effectiveness of these plans in their review. Instead, they focus on finding relevant ecosystem attributes and uses of these attributes in urban planning. While it is important to show what planners have been focusing on in the past, it is also important to consider how effective these focuses have been in order to identify areas of improvement.

I was happy to see that community engagement is an important component of most plans. As I said earlier, cities are areas of high human population. It is inevitable that human opinions and actions will affect biodiversity. By educating citizens about biodiversity, ecosystem services, and the goals of your plan, we can move together to create a larger impact.

Overall, I think this was an important contribution to urban biodiversity literature. Using a large scale approach to planning assessment highlighted similarities between values of urban planners. In regards to the plans themselves, it is obvious from the findings of this article that plans for urban biodiversity conservation need to become much more specific. While they may be well intentioned, a plan without measurable goals and target species is not effective. Goals need targets in order to ensure their effectiveness and completion. Species specificity is important to ensure actual increase of species diversity.

Charles H. Nilon, Myla F. J. Aronson, Sarel S. Cilliers, Cynnamon Dobbs, Lauren J. Frazee, Mark A. Goddard, Karen M. O’Neill, Debra Roberts, Emilie K. Stander, Peter Werner, Marten Winter, Ken P. Yocom, Planning for the Future of Urban Biodiversity: A Global Review of City-Scale Initiatives, BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 4, April 2017, Pages 332–342, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix012

Urban wildlife management is very tricky as people have many different levels of tolerance and attitudes towards wildlife. This paper addresses the complications with the idea of “the right place” to put an animal in relation to human society and the physical places it to which it “belongs.” To many people, pets belong in the city, livestock belong in the countryside, and wildlife belong in the wilderness. However, wildlife do not stick to strict boundaries, and many opportunistic generalists actually prefer city life. To gauge public opinion on wildlife placement in the city, this study asks residents of Munich, Germany where they want different species to occur.

To do this, researchers created flyers to describe the project and access to the online survey, and distributed it among houses and residential buildings. To me, this is one of the major limitations of the study. Doing surveys is always hard, as many of us have learned through statistics. I think it’s great that the survey is online and easily accessible; however, they distributed the flyers through handing them out on the street. I think this is a good way to get people’s immediate attention, but we all know how easy it is to ignore someone trying to give you something while you’re walking to class. Posted flyers could have been a way to mitigate this issue, so people could have voluntary interest. Multiple methods of outreach could also be beneficial. For example, people may be less likely to ignore a phone call or an email.

Survey participants were asked to share their demographics, relationship with nature, attitudes toward 32 different species, and where they wanted animals to occur. Demographics requested were age, gender, and highest finished education. I would be interested to see how socioeconomic status would affect opinions, but education level could possibly be used as a similar metric. The researchers chose generally recognizable species with a wide range of taxon. I think they chose a great group of animals, though I was surprised to see no large mammalian apex predators listed. Although this could be because they do not occur commonly in the city.

Since “nowhere” was rarely picked as a placement for these species, it shows that people do acknowledge that wildlife somewhat “belong” in the city. However, near the home was the least popular option for placement. With the abundance of yards and green space in residential areas, where does this leave the wildlife? If the wildlife are not to be allowed in the available greenspaces, then other areas in cities need to become available with resources and niche needs to divert wildlife away from the home. Overall, I think this was a very interesting study with a lot of insights into the effect of public opinion on urban wildlife management. These findings will be very beneficial for future urban planning, and the planning of outreach and public education initiatives about urban ecology.

Fabio S T Sweet, Anne Mimet, Md Noor Ullah Shumon, Leonie P Schirra, Julia Schäffler, Sophia C Haubitz, Peter Noack, Thomas E Hauck, Wolfgang W Weisser, There is a place for every animal, but not in my back yard: a survey on attitudes towards urban animals and where people want them to live, Journal of Urban Ecology, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024, juae006, https://doi.org/10.1093/jue/juae006