Conference Agenda

Urban biodiversity enhances quality of life and can foster conservation actions, but its benefits are not shared equitably among citizens. The positive correlation between biodiversity and socioeconomic status within cities (the Luxury Effect) represents a measure of environmental injustice. Understanding the drivers of this common but not universal relationship will help to promote more equitable cities and biodiversity conservation worldwide. We undertook a meta-analysis examining links between the strength of environmental injustice and socioeconomic variables in terms of terrestrial biodiversity. There was evidence for the Luxury Effect within cities. This relationship was stronger in wealthier cities and in countries with a lower GDP. There were non-linear relationships between human population size and the Luxury Effect, but no support for an effect of income inequality. The results suggest that poorer societies do not have the economic resources to confront environmental injustice, likely investing less in conservation actions. Non-linear models generally provided a better fit, supporting the theoretical background of the association between economic development and its environmental impacts. We suggest that non-linear associations are considered routinely in Luxury Effect studies. Further research is needed in under-represented countries in the developing world, which are likely those with greater environmental injustice.

Plants attract and support microbial and animal communities and play a key role to guarantee functional and healthy urban habitats based on biodiversity. The mutual interactions among the components of the plant-centered holobiont are basilar for resilience and their comprehensive analysis would be beneficial to link the functionalities with the plant performance, especially for trees. In this perspective, evaluating the root system health and role in the plant-centered holobiont ecosystem would be crucial not only to stability and management but also for conserving/monitoring/managing biodiversity and for environmental safety. Thus, we developed an innovative non-invasive protocol to characterize the root systems and their interactions with the abiotic/biotic components of the holobiont unit. With aim of characterizing urban biodiversity, as part of the recovery and resilience plan (PNRR) driven by National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC) of which the University of Molise is partner, we applied in urban contexts this protocol combining traditional root morphology and physiology descriptors with advanced methods relying on omics approaches integrated with imaging-based data and modelling assisted by bioinformatics. Data were collected and used to implement a database of root functional traits to be exploited for the modelling and prediction of developmental trends by machine learning.

Urban development can affect population dynamics, ecological interactions and fitness and challenge the persistence of many species, including bees. Yet, how and which urban environmental features affect bee diversity, foraging patterns, parasitism, life history, and fitness remain unclear. Here, we used a citizen science approach and cavity-nesting Hymenoptera in insect hotels as a model system, to investigate Hymenoptera community diversity, larval diet, parasitism, mortality, and reproductive output. In total, 286 insect hotels were used in two German cities at sites that span from the edge into a city’s core and several environmental variables were collected from each site. Overall, more than 10,000 and 2,000 individuals belonging to 12 cavity nesting bee and 23 wasp species, respectively, were sampled in all insect hotels and cities. Preliminary statistical analyses revealed a strong negative relationship between impervious surfaces and cavity-nesting Hymenoptera species richness and reproductive output. In addition, the proportion of urban green land uses was positively related to species richness and parasitism rate and indirectly to mortality. As cities expand worldwide, our study aims to highlight the main urban environmental factors that influence cavity-nesting bees and wasps and can help guide conservation management to reduce the adverse consequences of urbanisation on Hymenoptera.

Gardens are often decorated with non-native plants, which make them potential starting points of invasions. Using native plants adapted to the regional soil and climatic conditions instead of non-natives can decrease the invasion risks. In our project (https://www.vadviragoskertem.hu/), we ask people to choose 5 of 24 native wildflower species and offer seeds for decorating their gardens. In a questionnaire, we ask about reasons for choosing the certain set of species and about attitudes towards environmental-friendly practices in gardening. We aim to create a community of people interested in environmental-friendly gardening and will address follow-up questions about the establishment of the wildflowers. So far >5,000 people from 946 settlements in Hungary joined the project. We aim to increase social awareness and raise the profile of native plants as important components of urban biodiversity, and develop a seed mixture that can successfully establish in gardens and offer attractive alternative to non-native species.

Urban areas are very challenging for the conservation of biodiversity. Urban green infrastructure can contain mosaics of diverse habitat types, often including habitats with high potential for biodiversity, though urbanization also filters assemblages. This filter retains taxa that are resilient, and excludes taxa that are vulnerable. I hypothesize that taxonomic and specific traits determine this level of resilience or vulnerability of different taxa. In this study, I use data on selected insect taxa (bees, butterflies and carabid beetles) from subsets of a network of approximately 40 grassland habitats in Helsinki, Finland, sampled between 2008-2012. Using data on traits of species and taxa, I determine which environmental factors, and which traits, are most critical for determining urban grassland insect assemblages. I then use this information to make recommendations on planning green infrastructure for conserving insect diversity.