TY  - JOUR
AB  - Urbanization is a leading cause of biodiversity loss globally. Expanding cities alter regional ecological processes by consuming habitat and modifying biogeochemical and energetic flows. Densifying cities often lose valuable intra-urban green spaces. Despite these negative impacts, novel urban ecosystems can harbor high biodiversity and provide vital ecosystem services for urban residents. Recognizing the benefits of urban ecosystems, cities across the globe are increasingly planning for urban green infrastructure (UGI). UGI as a planning concept can transform how cities integrate biodiversity into urbanized landscapes at multiple scales and contribute to conservation goals. Full operationalization of UGI concepts can also reduce urban energy and resource demands via substituting polluting technologies by UGI, further contributing to the global conservation agenda. Realizing the potential contributions of UGI to local, regional, and global conservation goals requires addressing four inter-dependent challenges: (1) expanding social-ecological-systems thinking to include connections between complex social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS), (2) explicitly addressing multi-level governance challenges, (3) adapting SETS approaches to understand the contextual and biocultural factors shaping relationships between UGI and other causal processes in cities that shape biodiversity, and (4) operationalizing UGI systems through robust modeling and design approaches. By transforming UGI policy and research through SETS approaches to explicitly integrate biodiversity we can support global conservation challenges while improving human wellbeing in cities and beyond.
AU  - Grabowski, Z.*
AU  - Fairbairn, A.J.*
AU  - Teixeira, L.H.*
AU  - Micklewright, J.*
AU  - Fakirova, E.*
AU  - Adeleke, E.*
AU  - Meyer, S.T.*
AU  - Traidl-Hoffmann, C.
AU  - Schloter, M.
AU  - Helmreich, B.*
C1  - 68572
C2  - 53708
CY  - Van Godewijckstraat 30, 3311 Gz Dordrecht, Netherlands
SP  - 3595-3606
TI  - Cosmopolitan conservation: The multi-scalar contributions of urban green infrastructure to biodiversity protection.
JO  - Biodivers. Conserv.
VL  - 32
IS  - 11
PB  - Springer
PY  - 2023
SN  - 0960-3115
ER  - 

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Assessing local population size is one of the most common tasks in biodiversity monitoring. Population size estimates are not only important for conservation management and population threat assessment; they also enter many other analyses in landscape ecology and conservation. It is therefore concerning that methods for estimating plant population sizes are not standardized. We surveyed the literature and found that the most commonly used methods are counting either all or only flowering individuals on a site, as well as counting individuals in random plots or plots on transects. Sometimes, these methods are combined in the same study, without assurance that they produce comparable results. We therefore conducted a field study, in which we obtained population size estimates from all four methods for six different calcareous grassland species at 18 study sites. Our results demonstrate not only substantial differences between overall count rates generated by the different methods, but methods that surveyed the whole population also systematically yielded lower counts when species were less visible and when the area was larger, suggesting that these methods suffer from biases that could distort species and site comparisons. We conclude that estimates from different methods should not be mixed, and that plot or transect based surveys have likely smaller biases for large areas or poorly visible individuals, and are therefore preferable.
AU  - Reisch, C.*
AU  - Schmid, C.
AU  - Härtig, F.*
C1  - 53260
C2  - 44801
SP  - 2021-2028
TI  - A comparison of methods for estimating plant population size.
JO  - Biodivers. Conserv.
VL  - 27
IS  - 8
PY  - 2018
SN  - 0960-3115
ER  -