Cities are emerging as unexpected refuges for biodiversity
For decades, cities were written off by conservation scientists as biological dead zones, places with nothing worth studying or protecting. That view is rapidly changing. A growing body of research is revealing that urban areas harbor surprising levels of biodiversity, in some cases supporting more threatened species per square kilometer than surrounding rural landscapes.
Writing for Yale Environment 360, Janet Marinelli traces this shift through striking examples: a bobcat spotted along the Bronx River, a snowy owl in Central Park for the first time in 130 years, otters returning to Chicago, and flying squirrels appearing across the city in neighborhoods where they were never expected. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, similar scenes played out worldwide, from sea lions in Argentina to mountain goats wandering a Welsh seaside town.
Seth Magle, director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at Lincoln Park Zoo and founder of the Urban Wildlife Information Network, is one of the researchers at the forefront of this shift. He notes that urban wildlife science requires throwing out assumptions that work in rural settings. Cities operate by different ecological rules, and researchers are only beginning to understand them. UWIN is working to address one of the biggest gaps in the field, the lack of data across multiple cities, by developing standardized monitoring protocols now used by research partners across the US and Canada, with efforts underway to expand into Asia and Africa.
Scientists and conservationists are increasingly arguing that with over half the world's population already living in cities, and that figure expected to reach 70 percent by 2050, urban areas must be part of the solution to the global biodiversity crisis. As Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society put it, conservation is not just about biodiversity but about the human relationship with it. The healthier nature is in cities, where most people live, the more people will care about preserving it everywhere.
