Urban dwellers make up most of the population. contribute most of the economy and buy make most of the gross national product. In 2019 82% America were urban dwellers. Yet cities often get ignored in ecological discussions.

No more.

Urban Refuge: How Cities Can Help Solve the Biodiversity Crisis

Urban areas such as these have long been deemed to be devoid of biodiversity, especially by Americans, who glorify wilderness and believe that nature can flourish only where cities do not exist. “It’s been easy for people to think that cities, they’re just these moonscapes, completely sterile environments with just humans and maybe trees or grass,” said Seth Magle, director or the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Even scientists bought into the narrative and believed “we have no business spending any time or energy in cities,” he said.

While the value of urban areas to wildlife conservation remains contentious, there is a growing recognition that cities are key to the future of conservation as the human footprint expands relentlessly around the globe. In fact, researchers are increasingly working with city planners, landscape architects and urban wildlife managers to make cities part of the solution to the global biodiversity crisis.

Hey I know this one city that had beavers move into it and saw all this new wildlife as a result! I guess we weren’t the only ones huh?

Recent studies have found that animals from fishers to coyotes are appearing in force in urban areas. Magle points to the expansion of coyote populations in the United States as an urban success story. “Ninety-nine percent are good at avoiding us and eating squirrels and rats,” he said. “In just the past couple of years, we’re suddenly seeing a ton of flying squirrels in Chicago,” Magle said. “We never thought of them as an urban species, and now we’re seeing them all over the place.” Another surprise, he said, is the return of otters to the Windy City. “Who ever thought, given the quality of the water, that we’d ever see otters in the city again, but now they’re here.”

Some species, such as peregrine falcons, have higher survival rates or greater reproductive success in cities than in rural areas. Some even prefer urban landscapes. A 2017 analysis of 529 bird species globally found that 66 were found only in urban areas, including not only classic urban birds like feral pigeons, but also a variety of species native to their regions, like burrowing owls and black-and-rufous warbling finches. According to another review, diverse communities of native bee species persist in cities around the world, and in several cases, more diverse and abundant populations of native bees live in cities than in nearby rural landscapes. In Australia, researchers recently identified 39 imperiled “last chance” species that endure only in small patches of urban habitat, including trees, shrubs, a tortoise, a snail and even orchids.

Wow. That’s interesting about birth rates being higher in urban areas. I wonder if it applies to beavers?

While urbanization continues to pose a substantial threat to species and ecosystems, cities abound with a “wonderfully diverse” array of unconventional habitats “that can provide important habitat or resources for native biodiversity,” wrote University of Melbourne scientists in a 2018 paper in Conservation Biology. These range from remnants of native ecosystems such as forests, wetlands and grasslands, to traditional urban green spaces like parks, backyards and cemeteries, as well as golf courses, urban farms and community gardens. In addition, as cities invest in green infrastructure to ameliorate environmental harm, wildlife is increasingly occupying novel niches including green roofs and constructed wetlands and colonizing former brownfields and vacant lots. And the positive roles cities play in fostering biodiversity “can be bolstered through intentional design,” write the authors of the BioScience article on the “biological deserts fallacy.”

Those darn urban beavers. They sure have a lot to answer for. Bringing all these ecological pockets of biodiversity into our wildlife corridors!

Scientists have described several ways in which urban areas can benefit regional biodiversity. For example, cities can provide a refuge from pressures such as competition or predation that native species face in the surrounding landscape. A greater density of prey in cities has been linked to the success of several urban raptors, including Cooper’s hawks, peregrine falcons, crested goshawks and Mississippi kites. Cities also serve as stopover sites where migrating birds can rest and refuel. Large city parks, such as Highbanks Park in Columbus, Ohio, provide critical stopover habitat for thrushes, warblers and other migratory songbirds.

Researchers have also documented adaptations that have made some species, such as acorn ants and water fleas, more tolerant of the higher temperatures in cities than in surrounding areas. These adaptations, they say, could create populations that may be better able to tolerate climate change and in the future could colonize and help fortify rural populations.

You know how beaver dams create micro climates and this could be important in cities too? Well of course you do.

More than a decade ago, Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society, was pondering the future of conservation while standing under the Cross-Bronx Expressway, one of the busiest freeways in the U.S., beside the river that gave the highway its name. Just three blocks upriver, at the Bronx Zoo, is the headquarters of his employer, one of the oldest and most prestigious conservation organizations in the country, which is dedicated to conserving nature in the planet’s most remote and sparsely populated places. “In contrast,” he said, “before me was the antithesis of a wild place: an ecosystem that, in the popular vernacular of conservation, had been ‘hammered,’ which was literally surrounded by people.”

We’ll find you, don’t worry. If you have water in your city we will use it to travel and move in. That’s just what we do.

You’re welcome.

Conservation, Sanderson said in a recent interview, “is not just about biodiversity but about the human relationship with that biodiversity.” The healthier nature is in cities, where people live, the better that relationship will be, and the more people will care about preserving biodiversity everywhere, he said.

A city with happier beavers has happier people. That’s what Martinez learned a decade ago.

Drawing inferences from current patterns, Sanderson and his co-authors predict a severe bottleneck during the next 30 to 50 years, with heightened pressure on living systems, when more biodiversity losses can be expected. “However, if we can sustain enough nature through the bottleneck,” they write, the pressures will lessen, and a hundred years from now, with the vast majority of people living in cities, very few of them in extreme poverty, the human population could stabilize and even decrease. The only sensible path for reaching a world with 6 billion people and vast natural expanses, they conclude, is for conservationists to continue efforts to protect biodiversity, including in cities, “to build the foundations for a lasting recovery of nature.”

Urban wildlife matters to conservation. And matters to the urbanites who live with it. Let that sink in. Hsppy fourth of July and here’s Ben Franklin on beavers.