As the number of studies documenting the use of cities by a wide range of species across the world has grown in recent years, an interest has emerged in identifying how cities can be planned and retrofitted to benefit biodiversity. While recent urban ecology literature has called for coordinated heterogeneous management to create networks of green space for biodiversity, specific guidance will be needed to transfer ecological understanding into spatial planning at the city scale. Addressing this challenge requires a synthesis of how landscape patterns are related to biodiversity, an analysis of how species’ ecological characteristics influence their response to urbanization, and the creation of generalized, flexible design rules that can be used across cities to identify actions likely to lead to the greatest benefits to biodiversity. This type of ecologically-based guidance is important because interest and funding for a wide range of urban greening actions is growing, often with an expectation of some ecological benefit. However, common urban greening actions—ranging from stormwater features and greenways to drought-tolerant landscaping and expanded urban forests—generally are carried out with little ecological guidance.
Results/Conclusions
Drawing on literature from around the world, we developed a framework for enhancing biodiversity through coordinated design and management actions at multiple scales. We then applied this framework to California’s Silicon Valley in collaboration with a diverse set of local organizations (including NGOs, public agencies, and corporations such as Google). We find that actions to enhance urban biodiversity can be organized into a tractable set of seven major elements that work together at the city and patch scale to benefit a wide range of species that use the urbanized landscape in different ways. These can be applied systematically through a sequential approach that identifies the important actions for each element to enable planning at the city scale that integrates across all elements. We demonstrate that this approach makes ecologically-based guidance accessible to groups that have substantial effect on the urban landscape but might otherwise lack this kind of information. We demonstrate how this synthesis and translation of urban ecology science can produce urban forestry, corporate landscaping, and stormwater projects designed to maximize local biodiversity. We also explore how coordinated biodiversity actions can take place at a broader city scale through implementation across different sectors of urban design and management.