Best practices for designing resilient urban ecosystems through native species restoration

Abstract

Urban ecosystems provide a range of services that will become increasingly important in the coming decades as urban populations grow and urban areas intensify. Restoration and maintenance of these ecosystems is vital to the promotion of biodiversity conservation, human-nature interactions, and buffering against the effects of climate change. It is therefore crucial we design these urban ecosystems to be resilient to both climate change and urban stressors. The novelty of urban ecosystems, and their unique constraints and stressors, means that they require unique management and design practices than those used for conventional restorations in natural environments. Additionally, these novel urban ecosystems lack an analogous ecosystem to which comparisons can be made, which makes quantifying restoration success difficult. As such, ecological resilience—the maintenance of rich communities dominated by native species—becomes a more meaningful metric of success for urban restorations. Here, we propose a suite of management strategies designed to promote urban ecological resilience. Specifically, we focus on species pool selection, genetic input, landscape connectivity, and management regimes. While these considerations are important in all ecosystem restorations, these processes play an outsized role in urban ecosystems due to their unique pressures including heightened invasion pressure, depleted native seed pools, high degrees of landscape fragmentation and socio-economic constraints. By focusing on ecosystem resiliency, urban habitat restorations can be maintained with decreased long-term costs, increased biodiversity conservation, and improved human health and well-being.