Wilding cities for biodiversity and people: a transdisciplinary framework.

Accelerating urbanisation and associated lifestyle changes result in loss of biodiversity and diminished wellbeing of people through fewer direct interactions and experiences with nature. In this review, we propose the notion of urban wilding (the promotion of autonomous ecological processes that are independent of historical land-use conditions, with minimal direct human maintenance and planting interventions) and investigate its propensity to improve biodiversity and people-nature connections in cities. Through a large interdisciplinary synthesis, we explore the ecological mechanisms through which urban wilding can promote biodiversity in cities, investigate the attitudes and relations of city dwellers towards urban wild spaces, and discuss the integration of urban wilding into the fabric of cities and its governance.

Improving nature experience in cities: What are people's preferences for vegetated streets?

In the current context of strong urban sprawl, it becomes urgent to find urban approaches that simultaneously promote ecological functions and relationships between people and nature in cities. Streets are omnipresent urban elements that can deliver ecosystem services and facilitate people daily interactions with nature. Promoting vegetation in streets can take different forms which have to be combined with people's preferences.

Temporal Beta Diversity of Bird Assemblages in Agricultural Landscapes: Land Cover Change vs. Stochastic Processes.

Temporal variation in the composition of species assemblages could be the result of deterministic processes driven by environmental change and/or stochastic processes of colonization and local extinction. Here, we analyzed the relative roles of deterministic and stochastic processes on bird assemblages in an agricultural landscape of southwestern France. We first assessed the impact of land cover change that occurred between 1982 and 2007 on (i) the species composition (presence/absence) of bird assemblages and (ii) the spatial pattern of taxonomic beta diversity.

Is there an optimum scale for predicting bird species' distribution in agricultural landscapes?

Changes in forest cover in agricultural landscapes affect biodiversity. Its management needs some indications about scale to predict occurrence of populations and communities. In this study we considered a forest cover index to predict bird species and community patterns in agricultural landscapes in south-western France.

Assessing community-level and single-species models predictions of species distributions and assemblage composition after 25 years of land cover change.

To predict the impact of environmental change on species distributions, it has been hypothesized that community-level models could give some benefits compared to species-level models. In this study we have assessed the performance of these two approaches. We surveyed 256 bird communities in an agricultural landscape in southwest France at the same locations in 1982 and 2007.

Contrasting spatial and temporal responses of bird communities to landscape changes.

Quantifying the impact of land-use changes on biodiversity is a major challenge in conservation ecology. Static spatial relationships between bird communities and agricultural landscapes have been extensively studied. Yet, their ability to mirror the effects of temporal land-use dynamics remains to be demonstrated.