Promoting urban sustainability via linkages among stewardship, urban yards, biodiversity, and ecosystem services

Background/Question/Methods

Urban sustainability research explores the flows and fluxes of materials in urban ecosystems (e.g., water, energy, transportation, and food) and seeks to improve the livability of our cities. Several of these fluxes and flows occur in private yards; therefore yards provide an opportunity for urbanites to put into practice the reality that sustainability begins at home and to make individual household-level stewardship decisions that can scale up and improve city-level and even regional sustainability. Yards represent a significant proportion of urban green spaces and thus have the additional potential to support and enhance wildlife populations, biodiversity, and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration. However, stewardship activities vary considerably and thus wildlife might respond differently to the yard designs resulting from landscaping decisions. Given that yards exemplify socio-ecological systems, identifying new opportunities for stewardship has the potential to influence the designs of yards and thus strengthen the linkages with biodiversity and ecosystem services. I will review the research on the conservation value of yards for wildlife, how wildlife responds to different landscaping decisions, how people interact with the wildlife in their yards, and how interactions among people, their landscaping decisions, and wildlife populations may impact other ecosystem properties.  

Results/Conclusions

Ecological research in recent years has increasingly explored the connections between biodiversity and landscape design, between biodiversity and citizen science, and between landscape decisions and ecosystem services. Relatively few projects seek to investigate or explain all of these into a single framework. We suggest that projects which integrate all these domains demonstrate to urban dwellers the vital role they play in urban sustainability. Not only do households deepen their scientific understanding of how their yards function, they increase their ecological and scientific literacy, obtain a stronger sense of place, and develop a stronger connection to nearby nature. When urban ecologists design their biodiversity and ecosystem services studies, we recommend that they incorporate the two key drivers of householder decision making and citizen science into the study design. The increased scientific knowledge and connection to nature addresses the implementation gap of sustainable practices in urban yards. The partnership between biodiversity, citizen science and decision making in urban ecological research will promote solutions for scaling up yard efforts that create vibrant and sustainable neighborhoods and cities for both people and wildlife, and the ecosystem services on which they depend.