DISES-RCN: Urban Biodiversity Futures

The Urban Biodiversity Futures Research Coordination Network (UBF RCN) brings together scholars and practitioners to address the interlinked challenges of biodiversity conservation, climate resilience, and social justice. Urban areas are increasingly recognized as important sites for biodiversity conservation, and cities are investing in urban green spaces for their ecological benefits as well as their benefits for human well-being.

At the same time, urban green spaces are not distributed evenly across or within cities and climate change is creating an emerging challenge for urban biodiversity efforts. The UBF RCN is nurturing transdisciplinary conversations that engage scholars from diverse disciplines along with urban practitioners to synthesize knowledge and build a research agenda that captures the range of questions, hopes, and concerns at the intersection of urban biodiversity, equity, and climate change.

In addition, an important goal of the project is to train the next generation of scholars who can work across disciplines and collaborate with community partners. The project is providing educational and professional development opportunities for upwards of 20 graduate students and early career scholars.

While there is a mature body of research in both the natural and social sciences that interrogates urban biodiversity in increasingly nuanced ways, there are few transdisciplinary collaborations that deeply examine what biodiversity in the city means, how it functions for different groups of humans and nonhumans, and what it may take to produce equitable, just urban conservation in a climate-changed future. The UBF RCN responds to this need by building a multi-disciplinary community of scholars and practitioners to reconceptualize urban biodiversity, envision a transdisciplinary research agenda to understand and support just, resilient urban biodiversity conservation, and equip scholars and practitioners with the language and skills for interdisciplinary collaboration.

To do so, the investigators are hosting place-based workshops annually, supporting the coordination of interdisciplinary conference symposia and collaborations, providing training and mentorship for graduate students, and developing a web-based community. The findings and data are being disseminated in and beyond the four host cities and to multiple scholarly communities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.