Urban Areas are Expanding

Defining ‘urban’

• What does urban mean to

  • people

  • wildlife

• It can be tricky to settle on an urban definition. How to compare urban areas to suburban and rural areas?

• Potential variables to define urban include:

  • % Impervious surface

  • Housing or road density

Historical Development

• Historical focus on rural and wilderness environments. Managing ‘natural’ areas; “saving species that were valued for their aesthetic qualities; or animals that were traditionally hunted.

• Urban wildlife management was not regarded as a responsibility by many wildlife agencies until relatively recently.

• The convergence of 2 phenomena facilitated that change during the 1980’s and 1990s.

  • interest in wildlife amongst urbanites

  • human population growth was not uniformly distributed, causing human-wildlife interactions to vary within landscapes

Urban development as a threat to biodiversity

• Urban development may be one of the biggest threats to global biodiversity today

Diferent levels of urban tolerance

• Urban avoiders, urban adapters, urban exploiters

• New terms: urban avoided, urban utilized, and urban dweller form an updated gradient of responses to urbanization with each category representing a portion of that gradient

  • key update: within a species, population responses to urbanization occupy a range along the gradient of responses

Human-wildlife interactions

• Wildlife and humans interactions:

  • vary in intensity and duration

  • positive or negative?

Positive Interactions

• Social, physical, mental benefits for people

• Urban animals also regulate and support the ecosystems of towns and cities

• Nature walk, bird watching on NC State’s Campus = decreased stress, increased happiness for students

Wildlife caused damage

• Many view urban wildlife management more as wildlife “damage control”

  • damage to property

  • vehicle damage

  • health and safety concerns

Wildlife disease in urban areas

• Urban expansion, wildlife health, and human health are intricately interwoven

• Cities as zoonotic hotspots. Zoonotic disease are impacted by urbanization in many ways. Three major themes:

  • Increased movement of people, animals, and wildlife products

  • Urban landscape modification

  • The concentration of humans and inequality in the distribution of health services, clean food and water, and sanitation

Urban wildlife management in practice

• Urban wildlife management is…

  • technically complex

  • has no single acceptable solution

• Multiple outcomes and strategies of achieving those outcomes are desired by different stakeholders, based on their respective values

Why is urban wildlife management so tricky?

• Urban wildlife management takes place in an environment comprised of…

  • sociocultural

  • economic

  • political

  • and ecological components

• referred to as a social-ecological system or as coupled

Understanding people

• Management approaches must be contextually sensitive

• Acknwoledge the diverse socio-cultural and political landscapes across urban-rural gradients

• Traditional management typically includes population management or individual animal removal (lethal and nonlethal)

  • not always possible in urban areas, social or safety concerns

  • Need to understand these concerns to successfully implement

Finally, the “Pigeon Paradox”

• Future conservation will rely in part on our interactions with urban ecosystems and organisms

  • current conservation is insufficient

  • people take conservation efforts when they have prior experience in the natural world

  • people primarily have experiences with nature in the urban setting

• What is the paradox? focusing conservation on things we don’t already view as important. Careful how we portray urban nature—especially isf only before experience someone is getting