Urban Biodiversity

URBAN BIODIVERSITY

Learn how cities can protect biodiversity and secure the benefits of healthy ecosystems for all residents. This course focuses on biodiversity strategy in the context of city priorities, constraints, and planning processes. It provides learners with tools they can use to integrate nature-supportive actions into wider urban practices.

Available In:

Cities are ecosystems. And like all ecosystems, cities depend for their well-being on the countless living things that they comprise. Natural ecosystems within and near cities clean our air and water, moderate climatic extremes, supply the food and fiber that sustain our economies, and provide the beauty and recreational opportunities that help make our lives whole.

In this course, we examine biodiversity and strategies to protect it, but we do it through a specifically urban lens. We examine how biodiversity benefits cities’ human residents, and what cities can do to support biodiversity in the context of city priorities, constraints, and planning processes.

Learners completing this course will gain the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to:

Integrate biodiversity protection in a larger urban planning context
Evaluate designs for urban parks and water infrastructure based on their value as habitat
Make the economic case for investment in biodiversity
Build and implement a data strategy to support biodiversity protection in the long term

Learning Objectives

Biodiversity in Cities

Understand the importance of biodiversity to cities in terms of economic, environmental, and public health benefits. Describe methods for prioritizing species or ecosystems for protection and make the case for ecosystem protection even in the absence of detailed biological information.

Habitat Quality

Understand the roles that habitat size, connectivity, diversity and complexity play in supporting citywide and regional biodiversity. Recognize how these determinants of habitat quality manifest in urban design and planning.

Valuation of Nature

Articulate the benefits of biodiversity in terms of public health, economic well-being and civic life. Formulate strategies for quantifying and communicating these benefits to government and public stakeholders.

Data

Understand the principles of data strategy and indicator development; data acquisition, sharing, safety and governance; and interpretation and communication of data insights.

Course at a glance

In this course, we examine how biodiversity benefits cities’ human residents, and what cities can do to support biodiversity in the context of city priorities, constraints, and planning processes.

Duration

3 hours

Lead Institution

World Resources Institute

Languages

English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian Bahasa and Mandarin Chinese

Certificate

Personalized certificate provided upon course completion

Course Outline

Section 1: Biodiversity in the Urban Context

We explore why biodiversity is important to cities, and how cities can contribute to protecting biodiversity regionally and globally. We examine biodiversity through an urban lens and develop a specifically urban approach to protecting biodiversity and supporting healthy ecosystems. We also explore concepts useful to the prioritization of species for conservation while motivating a species-agnostic, whole-ecosystem approach.

Section 2: Habitat Functions

We examine the traditional concept of habitat, discuss how habitat functions to support healthy populations of living things, and develop a habitat concept designed to inform urban practitioners who lack high-quality biological information on local biodiversity.

Section 3: Determinants of Habitat Quality

Size: We examine the importance of habitat size from theoretical and practical perspectives.
Complexity: We explore how to recognize the many manifestations of habitat complexity, analyzing how complexity relates to vegetation management and the design and use of greenspaces.
Diversity: We look at the importance of a city protecting a diversity of habitats, both for protecting more types of living things and for maintaining complex urban ecosystems. We focus on ecological stressors and the fragility of non-diverse landscapes.
Connectivity: We examine the theoretical argument for landscape-scale habitat connectivity and explore case studies in which cities promote connectivity by protecting animal movement and building migration corridors.

Section 4: Valuation of Ecosystems

We explore strategies for quantifying the value of biodiversity and green spaces in terms of public health, economic well-being, and improvements to civic life. We examine case studies of green space valuation and develop a general framework for data-informed valuation.

Section 5: Data Strategy for Urban Biodiversity

We develop general concepts for using data in urban biodiversity strategy, focusing in depth on the Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity. We explore indicator development, data research, data sharing and acquisition, data safety and governance, data interpretation, and communication of data insights.

Course Authors

Ted develops data products, analytical tools and training resources to support governments in building sustainable communities. An ecologist by training, Ted has taught at several institutions of higher education including Bryn Mawr College and Ursinus College. Ted has a B.S. and Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and a Master of Forest Science from the Yale School of the Environment.

John-Rob oversees the day-to-day management of UrbanShift and helps to develop content for technical capacity-building courses. Prior to UrbanShift, John-Rob was the Implementation Manager for Cities4Forests, a WRI initiative that aims to cultivate awareness and catalyze action to conserve, manage and restore trees, forests and other nature-based solutions (NbS) inside and outside city boundaries. John-Rob holds a Master of Science in Environmental Policy from the University of Oxford.