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Australia is home to 39 urban-restricted threatened species – from giant gum trees, to ornate orchids, wonderful wattles, and even a tortoise. But with many of these species critically endangered, CAUL/TSR Hub researchers Kylie Soanes and Pia Lentini say that cities offer a golden opportunity to preserve species under threat, and engage people with nature.

Their research, published recently in an article for Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, showed that some of Australia’s most endangered plants and animals live entirely within cities and towns, often hidden in plain sight along railway lines, roadsides and schools. These threatened species have always lived in these locations, and as our cities have expanded they have incidentally become urban dwellers. But as the authors explain, space for nature in the city is quickly disappearing with urban growth and much is earmarked for future development.

In this recent article for The Conversation, Soanes and Lentini suggest we need to think differently about how and where we do conservation, get to know the species that live in our cities and involve urban communities in the process.

Featured image: Caley’s grevillea. Credit: Tatters via flickr

ABC Radio National broadcasted a segment last week, exploring the world of trees. Entitled ‘Lost and Found – Trees,’ the segment featured a discussion on the importance of urban trees with CAUL Hub researcher Judy Bush.

Judy discussed the many ways in which green spaces in our cities contribute to sustainability. For example, trees can mitigate urban heat and daily connection with nature is important for our health and wellbeing and can also contribute to a ‘sense of place’ and stewardship for local areas. As an example, Judy pointed to Greening the West’s achievement of planting one million trees in Melbourne’s west. Not only does this initiative highlight the massive transformative potential of urban tree planting, it also reminds us how many more ways there are to engage people with nature.

Judy recently co-authored this article in Pursuit on a similar topic.

Featured image credit: Casey Horner via Unsplash

The initial program for The Living Pavilion (May 1-17) has now been released – including over 60 thought-provoking and inspiring events featuring speakers, research activities, workshops and more.

Amongst 40,000 plants endemic to the Kulin Nation, The Living Pavilion’s temporary event space and living lab will bring together local designers, artists and scientists to explore relationships across Indigenous knowledge systems, ecological science, sustainable design and participatory arts. CAUL Hub is co-producing this event as a key research and knowledge brokering activity – and as such will be conducting research in a range of topics, such as urban greening, biodiversity place making and social science; and presenting our research through the CAUL Hub Talk series. For 17 days, The Living Pavilion will be open to all members of the public – to wander through and experience the dynamic landscape and enjoy the free programmed events and performances.

The Living Pavilion is located on the future site of the New Student Precinct at the University of Melbourne’s Parkville Campus and is a collaboration between the CAUL Hub, the University of Melbourne (Thrive Research Hub and The New Student Precinct), CLIMARTE ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE Festival, Ecodynamics Nursery and AILA Victoria.

Click here to register for events and visit the official Living Pavilion webpage for more information.

The successful conservation of insect biodiversity in urban environments relies, in part, on making insects and their ecological interactions tangible to people. But given that most insect species are small and fast, they remain largely unknown to onlookers, and are thus excluded from many conservation and citizen science programs.

To overcome this, CAUL Hub researchers Blythe Vogel and Luis Mata have helped host a series of ‘pollinator observatories’ workshops at Westgate Park. During these workshops, citizen scientists learn to identify different native and non-native pollinators and make observations of their interactions with different indigenous plants either on paper or using the CAUL Hub Urban Wildlife App. Not only does this provide researchers with critical data on the factors and seasonality driving plant-pollinator interactions in urban greenspaces, it is also helping to reconnect people with nature and showcase the benefits that nature provides to people and other species. Earlier this month, Westgate Biodiversity Bili Nursery & Landcare, City of Melbourne and CAUL Hub hosted the ‘Summer Citizen Science Workshop’ – the seventh and final in the series of pollinator observatories sessions at Westgate Park. Over 30 participants had the opportunity to learn about the project’s findings thus far, including the high diversity of native flies and bees that call the park home.

Featured image: Citizen scientists in Westgate Park. Credit: Luis Mata

Citizen science and other types of participatory activities can be tremendously engaging for people when properly designed. But by adopting some of the principles that make these approaches
engaging, we can also design research-oriented, crowd-sourcing instruments that engage large numbers of participants and allow researchers to easily collect massive amounts of social science data. As part of CAUL Hub’s project ‘The Shared Urban Habitat,’ my colleagues and I have developed the Animal Attractiveness Survey – a photo-preference and quantitative social science instrument that is collecting data on the visual and social features that make animals attractive and charismatic to people. Developed in 2018, the survey aims to reach a diverse range of participants from all over the world.

The data from this survey will feed into the decision-making framework we are currently developing, called ‘Bringing Nature Back into Cities’. We believe that the success of any action to bring nature back into cities ultimately depends on the ability of decision-makers to target the most suitable and appropriate species. A key question to ask when conceptualising the social dimension of this model is how charismatic is the species? The Animal Attractiveness Survey was
conceived to address this question. The photo-preference technique of the survey was adopted from a scientific paper that used this approach to study mammal charisma in five countries. Interestingly, the study showed that, to a degree, Australians found local species more charismatic than other more traditionally charismatic megafauna, such as tigers and elephants. By developing a survey that can potentially reach people in every country around the world, we are interested to see whether this pattern can be generalised to other regions. We are hoping the survey data will also help us explore whether people prefer specific animal taxa over others, for example mammals over birds, and whether people prefer animals that are biologically related to humans, such as apes, monkeys and lemurs.

When work on the Animal Attractiveness Survey began, I was surprised to learn that no open-access platform existed to conduct research-oriented, crowd-sourced data collection. At the time, I had been involved in a few expert elicitation exercises, which sought to inform research through the knowledge of domain experts. The Public Elicitation Platform was born from this idea – to support research themes in which everyone can be an expert.

Take part in the Animal Attractiveness Survey by heading over to the Public Elicitation Platform: https://publicelicitation.org/

– Luis Mata, leader of subproject 5.2