Themes

UrBioNet currently supports three main themes in the form of working groups. We also welcome ideas for new working groups.

 

Patterns & Traits of Urban Biodiversity

The Patterns & Traits working group is addressing a variety of questions to understand the global, regional, neighborhood, and local-scale processes that drive biodiversity in urban landscapes. They are currently focusing on the following question: Does the urban context (of a site) influence the functional traits of multiple taxonomic assemblages in consistent ways? To address this question we are conducting a global analysis on a collection of spatially explicit datasets for amphibians, bats, bees, carabid beetles, butterflies, birds, mammals and plants, but may also include additional groups if sufficient information can be collected in time.

Please see our call for data, including the project description.

Urban Biodiversity Monitoring and Planning

The Urban Biodiversity Monitoring and Planning working group will address questions related to how inventorying and monitoring biodiversity data can be applied to specific land management, planning, and design scenarios across a range of cities in the developed and developing world.

Socio-ecological Linkages in Cities

An initial research question for the Socio-ecological Linkages working group of UrBioNet is: what are the relationships between species richness and composition with socioeconomic gradients within cities? Initial work will focus on taxa with the greatest data availability, plants and birds, with additional analyses on other taxa as data permits. Since there are currently no quantitative comparisons of socioeconomic-biodiversity relationships across cities globally, even an analysis for a subset of cities will provide new insights into the relationships between local scale biodiversity and wealth, historical legacies, and income inequality.

Future Themes

Have an idea for a working group? Please contact Myla Aronson or Charles Nilon, Directors, UrBioNet at Myla.Aronson@rutgers.edu and NilonC@missouri.edu. We welcome new ideas and will help coordinate your group.