Conference Agenda

Urban ethnobiology is a scientific discipline focused on relationship and interactions between people and living things in urban ecosystems. In the face of overpopulation, climate change and Capitalocene, those relationships and interactions, part of people’s systems of beliefs, values and perceptions and embedded in urban ecological knowledge, it is of great importance to identify, document and interpret this type of knowledge, especially in major cities, including those of people’s living in the capital city of Albania, Tirana. In this article we will try to give insights on today’s major trends in urban ethnobiology and the basic notions which accompany them, and to address the why’s and how’s to conduct future ethnobiological studies in our cities. That is because these kinds of studies are absent. Additionally, in line with today’s scientific methods and communications technologies developments, we recommend that during ethnobiological fieldwork it is crucial the involvement and engagement of communities living in cities, through community-based research approach and citizen science projects for a meaningful and sustainable future.

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Urbanisation is one of the main drivers of land-use change with negative effects on biodiversity. Yet, insect communities have been shown to have contrasting responses to urbanisation with varying effects on their species richness and abundance. Here, we used a multiple spatial scale (small-scale mechanistic to landscape scale), interdisciplinary (ecological and socio-economic) within-city approach to investigate the impact of urban development on flying insect communities in three German cities. For this, we used pan traps in the cities of Hamburg, Leipzig, and Halle at 350 sites that spanned from the edge to the city centre and collected several local patch (temperature, nesting and floral-food resources) and landscape ecological variables, as well as socioeconomic factors that could affect insect communities. Overall, we collected more than 10,000 insect individuals and identified more than 21 hoverflies, 33 Coleoptera, 160 Hymenoptera, and 4 Lepidoptera species. Preliminary analyses revealed a negative relationship between impervious surfaces and species richness and a strong positive effect of local flower richness on insect biodiversity. Further analyses will provide insights into how environmental and socioeconomic factors can influence insect species and their functional traits and highlight key processes necessary to inform strategies to restore and maintain diverse urban insect communities.

The process of removing the impermeable top layer of soil, i.e. soil unsealing, is increasingly advocated by public policy. Despite recognized anthropogenic advantages such as water cycle regulation, the role of unsealed areas in soil biodiversity conservation remains understudied.

The objective of this study is to elucidate the impact of specific attributes of unsealed areas on ant colonization, a prominent group within soil biodiversity. We thus sampled 14 unsealed schoolyards in and around the city of Montpellier (France), investigating ant communities through the placement of 655 baits on unsealed plots. We tested two variables: the duration since soil unsealing (1 or 2 years) and the type of soil cover (wood chips, mulched plantations or grassed areas).

Our study facilitates an initial inventory of a previously unexplored environment. Remarkably, these areas act as habitats for ants from their very first years of creation: a rich diversity has been observed and notable changes in ant communities were evident within a single year. Additionally, wood chip-covered areas are significantly less rich and abundant in ants compared to other ground cover types. These preliminary findings signify a promising starting point for soil biodiversity conservation but require further exploration before guiding future unsealing operations.

Urbanization is now a leading cause of biodiversity loss. Yet, the processes structuring urban ecological communities are poorly understood. Most urban ecology investigates direct effects (e.g., competition, fragmentation), though ecologists have long recognized that indirect effects (e.g., trophic cascades) contribute to community composition in “wilder” spaces. We explored direct and indirect mechanisms that determine bird community composition in a case study of Vancouver, Canada. We hypothesize that, by inadvertently augmenting populations of scavengers (e.g., American crows) via food waste, people subsidize nest predation and undermine Vancouver’s bird diversity.

We surveyed bird diversity, abundance, food waste availability, and microhabitats across 14 varied transects in Vancouver. We triangulated these data with high-resolution land cover data. We then fit Bayesian hierarchical models to infer the relative effects of food waste and other variables (e.g., land cover, seasonality) on bird diversity and abundance.

Preliminary results indicate that food waste availability is positively associated with crow abundance and negatively associated with species richness, and crow abundance is negatively associated with species richness.

Our findings indicate that complex, indirect interactions likely structure urban communities, and warrant greater research attention. Additionally, interventions that reduce the food waste available to wildlife may augment urban biodiversity.

The fast expansion of urban areas drives multiple impacts on ecosystem such as the loss of biodiversity and the process of biotic homogenization, having direct consequences in animal-mediated ecosystem services such as regulating ecosystem services (RES). Urban areas are developed in a gradient that varies between two extremes: land sharing (small and fragmented green patches) and land sparing (large and continuous green areas). This landscape gradient and other local urban attributes (e.g. vegetation cover type) are related with changes in urban bird community composition. However, little is still known about whether they can affect animal-mediated ecosystem services. To investigate this, we carried out bird censuses in nine cities in Europe during breeding and winter season. We extracted diet information from each species identified, allowing us to calculate four RES: fruit dispersal, pollination, pest control and scavenging. The results show that land-sharing favor higher levels of avian-mediated RES, although there are differences between seasons. We also found an important effect of certain vegetation types and perturbance characteristics. These results provide new insights on the discussion on how to build more biodiversity-friendly cities by improving ecosystem functioning.

Human-induced habitat alteration is among the greatest threats to global biodiversity. Urbanization and associated habitat loss pose enormous pressure on native ecosystems. But at the same time, urban areas open new opportunities for biodiversity conservation, as protected areas alone are no longer sufficient. We studied bird communities and their functional traits in 10 medium-sized cities in the Carpathian Basin, spread over two countries (Hungary and Romania). Our study design focused on urban and suburban parks and agricultural and deciduous forest edges neighbouring the studied cities, representing an urbanization gradient. Our results showed that bird species richness was highest at the forest edges, and lowest in the urban parks, whereas urbanization did not affect abundance. Regarding the functional traits, mainly small-bodied birds were present in the cities and at the forest edges, just like species nesting on higher levels. Suburban parks favoured granivores, and those species that feed on higher locations were only observed at the forest edges. Non-migratory species were significantly more numerous in urban and suburban parks. Our finding demonstrates a strong urbanization effect in these mid-sized cities, but in some cases, urban parks harboured functionally important species as well, emphasising the positive role of urban green infrastructure.