Biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships in spatially heterogeneous, dynamic urban landscapes

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The current era of unprecedented urban growth has drastically changed ecosystem structure, function, and biodiversity, and consequently the ecosystem services (ES) (or benefits from nature) our health and wellbeing depend on. To create more sustainable cities, we need to identify opportunities to manage urban areas for biodiversity conservation and ES provision. This is particularly urgent in the context of climate change, which will have serious negative effects on urban residents if greater adaptation measures are not taken. However, our ability to manage for multifunctional urban landscapes lags behind our desire to do so, due to our limited understanding of the relationships between landscape structure, biodiversity, and ES at management-relevant scales. Given that conversion to urban land is among the most irreversible and fastest growing forms of global change, we need research that considers interactions among multiple ES and biodiversity in urban areas, while placing these relationships in the appropriate spatial and temporal context. My students and I will combine synthesis, observational, and modelling approaches within 3 component projects to study interactions among patterns of urban green space and development, biodiversity, and ES in a changing climate - using the city of Montreal as a focal case. Our first objective is to measure associations among biodiversity and multiple climate-related services provided by urban green space, forming the baseline of my emerging research program. Our second objective expands this work to consider the influence of landscape structure on biodiversity and ES across spatial scales. We will use a simple model to ask whether landscape configuration drives tradeoffs among biodiversity and ES, and field-based studies to assess the extent to which private management influences biodiversity and ES provision. Our third objective integrates a temporal perspective, considering changes in biodiversity-ES relationships due to climate change. We will use advanced sensor approaches to measure effects of tree canopy cover and diversity on urban air temperature, and develop scenarios to assess how changes in summer heat may alter temperate regulation services. The proposed objectives advance the growing field of urban landscape ecology, and improve our understanding of the relationship among biodiversity and ES over space and time. In line with our goals to produce solution-oriented research, this work also represents an important step towards developing biodiversity and ES indicators of use to urban planners, managers, and decision-makers in Canadian cities. This research involves collaboration among scientists, managers, and citizens, providing advanced skill development and networking opportunities for undergraduate and graduate trainees. Given the growth of urban ecology research and practice in Canada, students will be prepared for a range of basic science and applied careers.