Cities across the world increasingly reflect the ethno-cultural diversity of a globalized society. How people interact with, and experience urban nature varies with the form, structure, and function ...of the space, but also with peoples’ ethno-cultural identity. In this study, we investigated the values that gardeners and park users of different ethno-cultural identities associate with urban community gardens, parks and trees and the well-being benefits that they derive from them in Melbourne, Australia. We collected data from park users, and gardeners using intercept questionnaires with open-ended questions about motivations to garden and the importance of parks and trees to understand values, and standardized metrics on personal well-being to understand well-being benefits. The results show that gardeners and park users of different ethno-cultural identities than Australian and European, derived from the country of birth, language spoken, and region of origin, associate different motivations, importance, and well-being benefits to these different urban nature spaces. Community gardens provide food and a strong sense of community and security, particularly for gardeners that speak English as a second language. For these ethno-culturally diverse people, urban parks, like community gardens, are associated with sociocultural and psychological importance, but also with aesthetic importance. Finally, and also for these diverse people, urban trees are associated with aesthetic, naturalness and biodiversity importance rather than sociocultural importance. The results highlight that people involved in the planning and design of urban nature spaces should consider the many values associated with and benefits derived from different types of spaces for multicultural cities.
Our world is increasingly urbanizing which is highlighting that sustainable cities are essential for maintaining human well-being. This research is one of the first attempts to globally synthesize ...the effects of urbanization on ecosystem services and how these relate to governance, social development and climate. Three urban vegetation ecosystem services (carbon storage, recreation potential and habitat potential) were quantified for a selection of a hundred cities. Estimates of ecosystem services were obtained from the analysis of satellite imagery and the use of well-known carbon and structural habitat models. We found relationships between ecosystem services, social development, climate and governance, however these varied according to the service studied. Recreation potential was positively related to democracy and negatively related to population. Carbon storage was weakly related to temperature and democracy, while habitat potential was negatively related to democracy. We found that cities under 1 million inhabitants tended to have higher levels of recreation potential than larger cities and that democratic countries have higher recreation potential, especially if located in a continental climate. Carbon storage was higher in full democracies, especially in a continental climate, while habitat potential tended to be higher in authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Similar to other regional or city studies we found that the combination of environment conditions, socioeconomics, demographics and politics determines the provision of ecosystem services. Results from this study showed the existence of environmental injustice in the developing world.
•Human–nature connections are receiving increasing attention in sustainability science.•Relevant insights have been obtained in diverse disciplines, but integration is lacking.•‘Nature’ is often ...undefined and the focus is on the individual.•Groups of papers characterised by cognitive psychology, nature experience and place attachment.•Integrating, expanding, and focusing on transformation are key steps forward.
In sustainability science calls are increasing for humanity to (re-)connect with nature, yet no systematic synthesis of the empirical literature on human–nature connection (HNC) exists. We reviewed 475 publications on HNC and found that most research has concentrated on individuals at local scales, often leaving ‘nature’ undefined. Cluster analysis identified three subgroups of publications: first, HNC as mind, dominated by the use of psychometric scales, second, HNC as experience, characterised by observation and qualitative analysis; and third, HNC as place, emphasising place attachment and reserve visitation. To address the challenge of connecting humanity with nature, future HNC scholarship must pursue cross-fertilization of methods and approaches, extend research beyond individuals, local scales, and Western societies, and increase guidance for sustainability transformations.
Cities are hotspots for threatened species Ives, Christopher D; Lentini, Pia E; Threlfall, Caragh G ...
Global ecology and biogeography,
January 2016, Volume:
25, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
AIM: Although urbanization impacts many species, there is little information on the patterns of occurrences of threatened species in urban relative to non‐urban areas. By assessing the extent of the ...distribution of threatened species across all Australian cities, we aim to investigate the currently under‐utilized opportunity that cities present for national biodiversity conservation. LOCATION: Australian mainland, Tasmania and offshore islands. METHODS: Distributions of Australia's 1643 legally protected terrestrial species (hereafter ‘threatened species’) were compiled. We assessed the extent to which they overlapped with 99 cities (of more than 10,000 people), with all non‐urban areas, and with simulated ‘dummy’ cities which covered the same area and bioregion as the true cities but were non‐urban. We analysed differences between animals and plants, and examined variability within these groups using species accumulation modelling. Threatened species richness of true versus dummy cities was analysed using generalized linear mixed‐effects models. RESULTS: Australian cities support substantially more nationally threatened animal and plant species than all other non‐urban areas on a unit‐area basis. Thirty per cent of threatened species were found to occur in cities. Distribution patterns differed between plants and animals: individual threatened plant species were generally found in fewer cities than threatened animal species, yet plants were more likely to have a greater proportion of their distribution in urban areas than animals. Individual cities tended to contain unique suites of threatened species, especially threatened plants. The analysis of true versus dummy cities demonstrated that, even after accounting for factors such as net primary productivity and distance to the coast, cities still consistently supported a greater number of threatened species. MAIN CONCLUSIONS: This research highlights that Australian cities are important for the conservation of threatened species, and that the species assemblages of individual cities are relatively distinct. National conservation policy should recognize that cities play an integral role when planning for and managing threatened species.
Anthropogenic derived environmental change is challenging earth's biodiversity. To implement effective management, it is imperative to understand how organisms are responding over broad ...spatiotemporal scales. Collection of these data is generally beyond the budget of individual researchers and the integration and sharing of ecological data and associated infrastructure is becoming more common. However, user groups differ in their expectations, standards of performance, and desired outputs from research investment, and accommodating the motivations and fears of potential users from the outset may lead to higher levels of participation. Here we report upon a study of the Australian ornithology community, which was instigated to better understand perceptions around participation in nationally coordinated research infrastructure for detecting and tracking the movement of birds. The community was surveyed through a questionnaire and individuals were asked to score their motivations and fears around participation. Principal Components Analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of the data and identify groups of questions where respondents behaved similarly. Linear regressions and model selection were then applied to the principal components to determine how career stage, employment role, and years of biotelemetry experience affected the respondent's motivations and fears for participation. The analysis showed that across all sectors (academic, government, NGO) there was strong motivation to participate and belief that national shared biotelemetry infrastructure would facilitate bird management and conservation. However, results did show that a cross-sector cohort of the Australian ornithology community were keen and ready to progress collaborative infrastructure for tracking birds, and measures including data-sharing agreements could increase participation. It also informed that securing initial funding would be a significant challenge, and a better option to proceed may be for independent groups to coordinate through existing database infrastructure to form the foundation from which a national network could grow.
The evidence base for the benefits of urban nature for people and biodiversity is strong. However, cities are diverse and the social and environmental contexts of cities are likely to influence the ...observed effects of urban nature, and the application of evidence to differing contexts. To explore biases in the evidence base for the effects of urban nature, we text-matched city names in the abstracts and affiliations of 14 786 journal articles, from separate searches for articles on urban biodiversity, the health and wellbeing impacts of urban nature, and on urban ecosystem services. City names were found in 51% of article abstracts and 92% of affiliations. Most large cities were studied many times over, while only a small proportion of small cities were studied once or twice. Almost half the cities studied also had an author with an affiliation from that city. Most studies were from large developed cities, with relatively few studies from Africa and South America in particular. These biases mean the evidence base for the effects of urban nature on people and on biodiversity does not adequately represent the lived experience of the 41% of the world's urban population who live in small cities, nor the residents of the many rapidly urbanising areas of the developing world. Care should be taken when extrapolating research findings from large global cities to smaller cities and cities in the developing world. Future research should encourage research design focussed on answering research questions rather than city selection by convenience, disentangle the role of city size from measures of urban intensity (such as population density or impervious surface cover), avoid gross urban-rural dualisms, and better contextualise existing research across social and environmental contexts.
•An understanding of urban forest governance from the perspective of municipal managers is limited.•Interview data was collected from urban forest managers in local governments in Melbourne, ...Australia.•Challenges for managers’ decisions: inter-departmental coordination, community views, culture of risk aversion.•Some other challenges varied across urban centres.•Challenges of inner centres: lack of space, public consultation, and new developments•Challenges of outer/regional centres: urban expansion, active use of greenspace, and lack of data.
Awareness of the benefits of urban trees has led many cities to develop ambitious targets to increase tree numbers and canopy cover. Policy instruments that guide the planning of cities recognize the need for new governance arrangements to implement this agenda. Urban forests are greatly influenced by the decisions of municipal managers, but there is currently no clear understanding of how municipal managers find support to implement their decisions via new governance arrangements. To fill this knowledge gap, we collected empirical data through interviews with 23 urban forest municipal managers in 12 local governments in Greater Melbourne and regional Victoria, Australia, and analysed these data using qualitative interpretative methods through a governance lens. The goal of this was to understand the issues and challenges, stakeholders, resources, processes, and rules behind the decision-making of municipal managers. Municipal managers said that urban densification and expansion were making it difficult for them to implement their strategies to increase tree numbers and canopy cover. The coordination of stakeholders was more important for managers to find support to implement their decisions than having a bigger budget. The views of the public or wider community and a municipal government culture of risk aversion were also making it difficult for municipal managers to implement their strategies. Decision-making priorities and processes were not the same across urban centres. Lack of space to grow trees in new developments, excessive tree removal, and public consultation, were ideas more frequently raised in inner urban centres, while urban expansion, increased active use of greenspaces, and lack of data/information about tree assets were concerns for outer and regional centres. Nonetheless, inter-departmental coordination was a common theme shared among all cities. Strengthening coordination processes is an important way for local governments to overcome these barriers and effectively implement their urban forest strategies.
Human-wildlife conflicts are a growing phenomenon globally as human populations expand and wildlife interactions become more commonplace. While these conflicts have been well-defined in terrestrial ...systems, marine forms are less well-understood. As concerns grow for the future of many shark species it is becoming clear that a key to conservation success lies in changing human behaviors in relation to sharks. However, human-shark conflicts are multidimensional, each with different ecological, social and economic implications. Sharks have functional roles as occasional predators of humans and competitors with humans for fish stocks. In addition, and unlike most terrestrial predators, sharks are also important prey species for humans, being a source of animal protein and other products taken in fisheries. These functional roles are complex and often inter-dependent which can lead to multiple kinds of conflict. Shark management for conservation and human safety is also leading to conflict between different groups of people with different values and beliefs, demonstrating that human wildlife conflict can be a proxy for human-human conflict in the marine domain. Sharks are iconic species in society, being both feared and revered. As such human beliefs, attitudes and perceptions play key roles that underpin much human-shark conflict and future work to understanding these will contribute significantly to solutions that reduce conflict and hence improve conservation outcomes.
The idea of which species are native, based on their biogeographic origin, is central to many policies and programmes. Yet definitions are contested and the meanings of ‘nativeness’ are often complex ...and confusing for many people. For example, a plant that would be considered 'native' in Australia might have a native bioregion that is thousands of kilometres from a given garden planting. The idea of nativeness is culturally constructed and connotes different meanings in different contexts. As conservation research and practice increasingly incorporate human values and behaviours, operationalising the social dimensions of ecological concepts such as nativeness is needed to generate a more holistic evidence base and improve the management of native and non‐native species.
We used a sequential mixed‐methods systematic review approach to review and synthesise literature on people's (including general publics, gardeners, conservationists) perceptions of nativeness of species and landscapes. A meta‐synthesis of qualitative research identified six dimensions that underlie people's perceptions in relation to nativeness: Belonging (a sense that there is a right or wrong place for a species to exist); human influence (the role of humans in moving species outside of their historic ranges); functional compatibility (a species' alignment with the local environment and ecology); amenity (desirable and useful features provided by a species); negative impacts (risk and manageability of detrimental impacts caused by a species); and identity (species forming part of one's place‐based identity).
A systematic review of the quantitative urban literature found that most research on perceptions of native and non‐native species and landscapes did not operationalise nativeness in a multidimensional way, focusing predominantly on the ‘Negative impacts’ dimension. This may often be inadequate for meaningfully capturing people's views.
Our results also highlight the need to strengthen interdisciplinarity between natural and social sciences, and for better integration of social science theories to improve the interpretability and transferability of research findings.
We provide recommendations for future research that operationalises nativeness using a broader range of meanings that will inform a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the human dimensions of conservation issues, especially within the contested and briskly evolving terrain of urban greening.
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
•Rural areas adversely affected by environmental degradation and poor health outcomes require innovative solutions.•Ecological restoration activities benefit human and ecological wellbeing, yet are ...disconnected from the mainstream health sector.•Participants describe a suite of health and wellbeing benefits from participation in ecological restoration activities.•Participation in well-designed, holistic ecological restoration programs can contribute to ameliorating complex health problems.
Just as ecological degradation contributes to many public health problems, restoration of these areas can be health-enabling not only for the environment but also for people. However, despite growing recognition of the positive relationships between ecological restoration and human health, knowledge gaps persist. Rural areas are most closely affected by ecological degradation from industries such as forestry, farming and mining and rural populations suffer the poorest health outcomes. Nevertheless, the wellbeing benefits of ecological restoration for participants and communities in these areas are under-researched. Rural wellbeing is impacted by factors of geographic isolation, poverty and limited health services which generate rural health inequities. Place-based ecological restoration activities have the potential to address individual and community-level wellbeing issues. In this paper we report on a qualitative study from the Break O'Day municipality in Tasmania, Australia, the site of over 20 years of ecological restoration by local people. The organisation leading the restoration work, the Northeast Bioregional Network, observed that well-organised holistic ecological restoration projects could cultivate ecological ethics and improve human health. Using interview data, we explored the lived impacts of ecological restoration on various aspects of participant health and wellbeing, as well as the observed community-wide benefits. Our analysis identified certain characteristics of place-based ecological restoration participation that are supportive of wellbeing, and the opportunities for improved synergies between ecological restoration and mainstream rural health service provision. We conclude that participation in well-designed, holistic ecological restoration programs can contribute to ameliorating complex health problems affecting rural communities.
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