Does Nature Need Cities? Pollinators Reveal a Role for Cities in Wildlife Conservation

Abstract

It is well-established that cities need nature for critical ecosystem services-from storing carbon, to reducing temperatures, to mitigating stormwater-and there is growing momentum to seek out strategies for how these services can intersect with urban design and planning efforts. Social scientists and conservation planners increasingly point to urban residents' need to breathe fresh air, encounter the natural world, and have room to play. It is less obvious, perhaps, whether nature needs cities in order to thrive. The evidence from both urban planning and conservation planning is increasingly "yes." As changes in land use and land cover sweep the planet, cities are becoming important refugia for certain wildlife populations. In recent years, urban planning has embraced the concept of "green infrastructure" as a way to embed green space across metropolitan landscapes to draw on the inherent benefits nature provides to cities, as well as to create habitat for wildlife. We explore this evolving view of cities and nature in the fields of urban and conservation planning. We argue the time is ripe to bring these worlds together, and, using our empirical work, establish that cities matter for monarch butterflies, other pollinators, and at-risk wildlife species.

Mixed-Species Gardens Increase Monarch Oviposition without Increasing Top-Down Predation

“…Although most research and conservation initiatives are in the midwestern U.S., the southeast supports the eastern migratory population as well as resident and winter breeding populations in Florida [ 39 , 40 ]. Most efforts are also focused in natural or agricultural areas, although urbanization is a leading cause of land use change and habitat loss [ 41 ], but present unique and important conservation opportunities [ 42 , 43 , 44 ]. However, there is little known about the optimal design or composition of habitats we should create for monarchs in urban green spaces to address top-down and bottom-up drivers of populations of this specialist herbivore.…”

Use of botanical gardens as arks for conserving pollinators and plant-pollinator interactions: A case study from the US Northern Great Plains

“…It is made The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted February 27, 2021. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.26.433109 doi: bioRxiv preprint examined how urbanization and impervious surfaces may impact pollinator movement (Fortel et al 2014;Levé et al 2019). Recent work has highlighted the potential conservation value of urban green spaces for pollinator communities, especially those found within cities (Micholap et al 2017;Lewis et al 2019). We further develop these approaches by quantifying and comparing the diversity and interactions of plant-pollinator communities within a restored native grassland patch centered in a botanical garden and remnant temperate grassland habitats in order to understand how these environments may differ with regards to plant-pollinator community structure.…”

“…Clearly, the potential conservation value botanical gardens hold could extend beyond plant conservation. These gardens could provide space for several resources that pollinators utilize (i.e., foraging and nesting resources), even in areas that would typically be considered resource-poor (e.g., cities) (Lewis et al 2019).…”

Living in the concrete jungle: carnivore spatial ecology in urban parks

“…If humans function as shields and facilitate spatial overlap in the carnivore community, then urban areas could serve as key refugia in cities and increase co-existence in an otherwise Accepted for publication in Ecological Applications (December 2020) highly competitive guild. Paradoxically, the human shield hypothesis indicates that urbanization does not inherently result in biodiversity loss at the patch scale, given that subordinate species can exploit refugia (Moll et al, 2018;Lewis et al, 2019). However, biodiversity loss due to urbanization at both the landscape and global scale remains a concern for conservation efforts (Mcdonald et al, 2013;Mcintyre, 2014;Lewis et al, 2015).…”