ReviewNovel urban ecosystems, biodiversity, and conservation
Highlights
► This paper reviews biotic responses to urbanization and urban conservation approaches. ► Cities may be rich in both native and nonnative species. ► Urban habitats cannot replace the functionality of natural remnants. ► However, even novel urban habitats may harbour rare and endangered species. ► Conservation approaches should consider the perspective of novel urban ecosystems.
Section snippets
Cities and biodiversity—a major challenge
Biodiversity conservation emerged as a field of international policies in the 2nd half of the 20th century, culminating in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which entered into force in 1993. Although urban areas globally cover only about 3% of the earth’s land surface (MEA, 2005), urban growth imposes major challenges to biodiversity conservation as it has already induced a profound transformation at the landscape level and is regarded as a major threat to biodiversity (Antrop, 2004
Biotic responses to urbanization
A wealth of urban studies addresses biotic responses to urbanization, although care must be taken with generalizing their results. Most studies are from Europe and North America, while other regions are still underrepresented. Biodiversity patterns have been addressed at different scales and with a variety of approaches to differentiate urban from nonurban systems. This hampers comparisons between different studies, but some general insights into the changes in urban species composition and
Novel urban ecosystems and the four natures approach
Profound human-mediated changes in natural settings can lead to lasting deviations of ecosystem dynamics and thereby to a shift in ecosystem types. Such developments were recognized early on in intensively used European landscapes (e.g., Bernatsky, 1904, von Hornstein, 1950), and conceptually assessed as a change in “potential natural vegetation” (Tüxen, 1956). In a seminal paper, Hobbs et al. (2006) addressed the result of such changes as “novel ecosystems,” which are characterized by two
Nature conservation in urban areas
In face of an accelerating transformation of rural landscapes by urbanization the need to protect remaining remnants of (semi-)natural habitats increases. Yet in the urban millennium, the importance of biodiversity conservation within cities generally grows as well. Early conceptual papers on urban nature conservation (e.g., Auhagen and Sukopp, 1983) as well as more recent papers highlight two main reasons for enhancing conservation activities in urban settings: (1) as a contribution to the
Acknowledgements
This paper is dedicated to Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Herbert Sukopp, the major pioneer of urban ecology in Europe, at the occasion of his 80th birthday in November 2010. My thanks are due to Bill Manning and Claudia Wiegand for stimulating this contribution, to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments, and to Kelaine Vargas for improving my English.
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