Protecting and enhancing biodiversity in urban areas is critical for meeting international conservation commitments, and has a vital role to play in the health and wellbeing of city residents. Yet, urbanisation can have devastating impacts on biodiversity, with urban development typically delivering landscapes in which habitat remains only as small, fragmented patches, surrounded by an inhospitable urban matrix. As cities begin to plan for urban biodiversity alongside other land use considerations, planners can leverage ecological knowledge and conservation planning concepts to aid decision making to deliver benefits for nature and people. Here we demonstrate how targeted green infrastructure placement can potentially increase the delivery of landscape level benefits for biodiversity by improving connectivity for native species. We measure the change in ecological connectivity when parking spaces are converted to small green spaces across the City of Melbourne, Australia. We test three reallocation scenarios with varying levels of parking space conversion to green infrastructure and varying levels of spatial prioritisation to ecological connectivity. While the scenario that maximised the number of parking spaces converted performed best, we show that greening delivered the strongest connectivity outcomes per unit of area converted. Improvements in connectivity were two times higher per unit effort when conversion was targeted towards locations identified as potentially important barriers to landscape-level movement. Our research emphasises the advantage of strategically targeted green infrastructure investment to support urban biodiversity.

中文翻译：

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基于自然的城市生物多样性解决方案：改造的空间目标可以倍增生态连通性效益


保护和增强城市地区的生物多样性对于履行国际保护承诺至关重要，并且对城市居民的健康和福祉发挥着至关重要的作用。然而，城市化可能对生物多样性产生破坏性影响，城市发展通常会导致栖息地仅保留为小而分散的斑块，周围环绕着不适宜居住的城市矩阵。随着城市开始将城市生物多样性与其他土地利用考虑因素一起规划，规划者可以利用生态知识和保护规划概念来帮助决策，为自然和人类带来利益。在这里，我们展示了有针对性的绿色基础设施布局如何通过改善本地物种的连通性来潜在地增加生物多样性的景观水平效益。我们衡量了澳大利亚墨尔本市停车位改造成小型绿地时生态连通性的变化。我们测试了三种重新分配方案，其中停车位转换为绿色基础设施的程度不同，生态连通性的空间优先级也不同。虽然最大限度地提高停车位转换数量的方案表现最佳，但我们表明，绿化在单位转换面积上提供了最强的连通性结果。当转换针对被确定为景观水平移动的潜在重要障碍的位置时，每单位工作量的连通性改善要高出两倍。我们的研究强调了战略性有针对性的绿色基础设施投资在支持城市生物多样性方面的优势。