Ecological concepts necessary to the conservation of biodiversity in urban environments

Abstract

Increasingly, landscape architects, planners and other land-use practitioners have the task of creating functional landscapes that maintain biodiversity. They need to be familiar with a range of evolving concepts and techniques that have been identified as crucial in the conservation of biodiversity. We discuss key concepts, eg. island biogeography, minimum viable populations, metapopulations, homogenization, extinction debt, and patch dynamics, which link species richness to biodiversity at the regional scale. We use birds as a scaling example to demonstrate the range of research necessary to assess biodiversity across multiple scales in an urban environment.