Traditional ecological approaches often struggle to capture the unique dynamics of cities: extreme levels of habitat loss and fragmentation, rapidly shifting land use, and the interplay of ecological and social processes. Knowledge gaps remain around how species adapt to urban areas, how biodiversity contributes to human well-being, and how to scale insights from local case studies into broader conservation frameworks. Moreover, taxonomic biases, limited long-term monitoring, and insufficient integration of social and cultural aspects continue to limit our understanding.
This session highlights novel methods, concepts, and models that expand the frontiers of urban biodiversity research. We welcome contributions that may include:
- Innovative tools for studying urban biodiversity (e.g., predictive biodiversity modelling, eDNA, AI-assisted monitoring, remote sensing, citizen science).
- Urban eco-evolutionary processes and their socio-ecological drivers.
- Integration of social and cultural dimensions of biodiversity in cities.
- Case studies that identify overlooked aspects of urban biodiversity.
By addressing blind spots with new approaches, this session aims to advance a more comprehensive understanding of urban biodiversity and promote resilient, biodiverse cities that support human well-being (Global Biodiversity Framework, Target 12).
Urban landscapes are increasingly recognized as complex socio-ecological systems where biodiversity, built form, and human experience intersect. Beyond the intricate interconnections among biodiversity and provisioning and regulating ecosystem functions, these environments deliver Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) such as aesthetic enjoyment, recreation, social relationships, and sense of place. Yet these intangible and experiential benefits remain underrepresented in biodiversity research, largely due to methodological constraints in capturing and interpreting public perceptions at scale. Recent advances in digital data availability, particularly user-generated content on social media, combined with the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) now provide promising avenues for uncovering how urban biodiversity and landscape features are encountered, interpreted, and valued in everyday life. By revealing how individuals articulate value, meaning, and emotional connection to urban nature in situ, such approaches help illuminate the perceptual and experiential pathways through which urban environments foster pro-environmental intentions, stewardship attitudes, and forms of place-based ecological care.
This study examines the potential of LLMs to analyze public perceptions of urban nature using textual and visual content from the Flickr platform. Employing a prompt-based, zero-shot learning framework, several LLM architectures were adapted to identify nature-related elements and CES associated with urban landscapes. Model outputs were systematically compared across prompt formulations and validated against classifications made by human researchers to assess accuracy, interpretive depth, and sensitivity to linguistic variation. The findings demonstrate that LLMs can effectively detect subtle, context-dependent expressions of how people perceive and describe urban nature, capturing collective patterns of appreciation and engagement that reflect cultural, aesthetic, and ecological dimensions of urban environments. However, model performance varied across prompt structures and model types, underscoring the need for methodological transparency, careful prompt engineering, and iterative model refinement to ensure reliable outcomes in AI-assisted environmental research.
By integrating LLMs, social-media analytics, and landscape research, this study presents a scalable and replicable approach for interpreting the human dimensions of biodiversity in cities. It advances digital methodologies for assessing the social and cultural foundations of urban ecosystems and offers insights that support inclusive, evidence-based urban planning aligned with the goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework (Target 12).
How to cite: Khromova, S., Calcagni, F., Solyemani Fard, R., and Langemeyer, J.: A Digital Lens on Urban Biodiversity: Exploring Urban Nature Perceptions with Large Language Models, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-684, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-684, 2026.
The Amazon biome, one of the world’s major biodiversity hotspots and a key regulator of climate and biogeochemical cycles, is experiencing rapid urban growth and associated land-use change, reshaping biodiversity at the forest–settlement interface. Yet biodiversity in this region remains far less documented than in temperate zones, limiting our ability to understand and anticipate the effects of urbanization. This gap is especially critical for soil biodiversity, a fundamental component of ecosystem functioning but often overlooked in conservation or urban planning. Here, we investigate how urbanization affects size-structured soil food webs across French Guiana, an Amazonian territory offering a clear pristine forest–to–urban gradient, especially along the coasts and rivers where most inhabitants live. We built an integrated eDNA metabarcoding database spanning forests to urban areas across the territory, leveraging citizen-science initiatives for urban soil sampling. Identified soil taxa were classified into 79 trophic guilds and further assigned to either the micro-food web (microbes and microfauna) or the macro-food web (meso- and macrofauna). We hypothesized that increasing urbanization would reduce overall soil food-web complexity, measured as guild richness, and restructure communities by decreasing top predators while favouring generalists, with different mechanisms operating in micro- versus macro-food webs. Contrary to expectations, urbanization increased micro-food-web complexity, driven by positive responses to soil phosphorus and human footprint. This increase was primarily explained by decomposer and plant-symbiont guilds, while richness of higher-trophic-level guilds, including zooparasites and microbivores, remained stable. In contrast, the macro-food web showed no significant change in overall guild richness, although the trend was negative, and richness responded negatively to higher pH, lower C:N ratios, and higher population density, all changes related to the urbanization process. Urbanization also significantly restructured macro-food webs: higher-level consumer guilds declined, whereas herbivore and omnivore guilds peaked at intermediate urbanization levels. Our findings reveal complex, compartment-specific effects of urbanization, with contrasting responses between micro- and macro-food webs. Overall, results indicate a shift toward bottom-heavy, potentially bottom-up-regulated communities, highlighting implications for ecosystem functioning. Using eDNA and citizen-science approaches, this study provides new insights into how urbanization shapes size-structured, multitrophic terrestrial communities in the tropics.
How to cite: Calderón-Sanou, I., Piatscheck, F., Schimann, H., Zinger, L., and Orivel, J.: Contrasting responses of soil micro- and macro-food webs to urbanization across an amazonian forest-city gradient, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-862, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-862, 2026.
As cities densify, green spaces play an increasingly critical role in sustaining urban biodiversity. Yet the relative contribution of habitat patches of varying size, connectivity, and quality has typically been assessed at the patch level, overlooking how these factors shape biodiversity at the landscape scale. Using a decade of monitoring data for invertebrates, vertebrates, and trees across 452 habitat patches in Zurich, Switzerland, we examined how patch area and environmental conditions shape alpha, beta, and gamma diversity. We found that larger patches harbored higher alpha diversity, consistent with the species-area relationship, but also that small patches disproportionately contributed to beta diversity by promoting community turnover. Further analyses also indicated that, per unit area, groups of small patches often supported higher gamma diversity than a few large ones, particularly for trees and invertebrates. Generalized dissimilarity models futher revealed that patch area was a consistent predictor of community composition, not solely via richness effects but through interactions with environmental conditions—including vegetation complexity, water availability, impervious cover, and connectivity to forested habitats. These drivers produced broadly parallel compositional gradients across taxa, with large peri-urban patches hosting more homogeneous and compositionally stable communities, and small inner-city patches supporting distinct, environmentally heterogeneous assemblages. Taxon-specific patterns also emerged: horticultural practices strongly structured tree communities, while invertebrates responded most strongly to landscape-scale factors and vertebrates to local habitat conditions. Collectively, our findings challenge prevailing assumptions in urban planning that prioritize only large patches, showing that even very small green spaces (<1 ha) make essential contributions to gamma diversity and maintain unique biological assemblages. Although small patches do not substitute for habitat loss, they retain high ecological value and can act as stepping stones that facilitate regional persistence. Maintaining a diversity of patch sizes and environmental conditions will therefore be critical for conserving multi-taxon biodiversity in urban landscapes.
How to cite: Perrelet, K., Cook, L. M., Altermatt, F., Riva, F., and Moretti, M.: Small habitat patches are the largest contributors to urban biodiversity across taxonomic groups , World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-351, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-351, 2026.
Acoustic communication is essential for bird behavior, mediating inter- and intraspecific interactions, such as mate attraction and territory defense. These communication strategies are influenced by environmental factors including vegetation structure, microclimate, and ambient sound levels. Environmental factors affect sound propagation and the signal-to-noise ratio, which in turn impacts how far a sound can be heard by bird individuals and how effectively individuals can communicate with one another. Urban environments, however, present unique acoustic challenges for birds. Anthropogenic noise from traffic, construction, and human voices can mask natural sounds, significantly reducing the effective range of bird songs and increasing the biological costs of vocal communication. Additionally, buildings and roads alter sound transmission in various ways: while buildings can block or scatter sound waves, road corridors flanked by structures may enhance sound propagation. Although past studies have explored the impacts of human-made noise and urban structures on sound transmission, much less is understood about how these factors specifically affect the propagation of bird songs in urban landscapes. This project aims to address this knowledge gap by empirically measuring the detection range of songs from common urban bird species in Munich (Germany). We conduct controlled sound propagation experiments by broadcasting bird songs through a loudspeaker at gradually increasing distances from a recording device. By quantifying how signal characteristics and sound levels are expected to diminish with distance, and by analyzing anticipated frequency-dependent degradation using novel methods, the study aims to generate detailed propagation profiles for each species. Experiments are replicated across various urban locations that represent diverse landscape configurations, including open parks, tree-lined paths, and areas bordered by dense buildings. This approach will capture the influence of both physical structures and fluctuating human noise levels. The resulting data will contribute to new predictive models of bird song detection ranges under different urban conditions. This work is part of a broader effort to design sustainable, biodiversity-supportive urban green spaces. By enhancing our understanding of how urban infrastructure affects the transmission of natural sounds, the research will provide valuable insights for urban planners aiming to create sound environments that benefit both wildlife and human residents.
How to cite: Busana, M., Schulz, L., Meyer, S., Schiebel, R., Croci, S., Barnagaud, J.-Y., Sebe, F., and Egerer, M.: Can Birds Still Be Heard? Assessing Song Detection in Urban Landscapes, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-227, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-227, 2026.
Urban expansion drives land use and land cover change (LULCC), yet the exact drivers of this change, especially at localised scales, are not always known. Furthermore, urban natural areas, essential for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, are often transformed to other uses. This study examined spatiotemporal patterns and drivers of LULCC in the City of Tshwane (CoT), between 1990 and 2022. The objectives were to (1) describe LULCC, (2) identify drivers of LULCC, (3) identify drivers of LULCC in areas of natural vegetation, and (4) identify drivers of LULCC in riverine areas across the CoT. We compared land cover between 1990 and 2022 to assess LULCC, with a particular focus on transformations from ecologically sensitive natural vegetation and riverine areas to other land cover types. Generalised Linear Models and Geographically Weighted Regression were used to evaluate how socioeconomic and environmental variables influenced LULCC. Overall, 25.9% of the CoT experienced change in land cover between 1990 and 2022. Notable increases were seen in bare land (2902.9%), built-up areas (105.5%), and formal residences (95.6%), while recreational areas, natural vegetation, and waterbodies declined by 41.7%, 20.6%, and 16.5% respectively. Natural vegetation was mostly converted to cultivated land, built-up areas, and formal residences. Riverine areas experienced increases in cultivated land, built-up areas, formal residences, and bare land, and decreases in natural vegetation. Across the CoT, LULCC was more likely to occur in areas of higher population density, and closer to roads. However, geographically weighted regression revealed spatial heterogeneity in the strength, and in some cases the direction, of drivers of LULCC. In areas of natural vegetation, population density best predicted LULCC, while in riverine areas, distance to roads had a strong negative association with LULCC. These findings highlight that both human demography, and site accessibility, are important drivers of urban expansion, possibly leading to significant biodiversity losses.
How to cite: Shirinda, H., Hansen, C., Katumba, S., and Greve, M.: Patterns and drivers of land cover change in the City of Tshwane, South Africa, with a focus on change dynamics in ecologically sensitive areas, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-160, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-160, 2026.
