It is very clear that around the world we use different metrics to characterize the urban environment and determine its boundaries. Some articles have reviewed these aspects and are undoubtedly extremely useful for work on urban biodiversity. There are studies that use NDVI, NDBI, roof spectra, housing clusters, percentage of water availability, among many others. The great diversity of metrics often makes it difficult to compare results, is this also a fact for you?
I agree with you totally. We found the same trouble when measuring the impact of urbanization on odonates. Correct Catalina María Suárez Tovar ?
The future of biodiversity is strongly intertwined with urbanization, which is a major driver of environmental change. Cities can support a diverse range of plant and animal species, and this urban biodiversity supports a variety of regulating provisioning and cultural ecosystem services. Creating biodiversity-friendly cities is therefore inextricably linked to long-term urban development and human well-being. The contributions to this Special Issue on “Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Urban Development” in the journal Sustainability highlight the role of urban environments as biodiversity pressures and envision pathways to developing more biodiverse urban environments that are accepted and sustainable.
I am using right now Gridded Population of the World (GPW), v4
https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v4
If you want to illustrate it, GIS can help you. For example when I wanted to see the extension of urbanized areas in the city, once I tried to use nighttime lights (MODIS) https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/tags/lights. You can download it and use some filters according to your research, then you will have some borders of urbanized areas. Well it is not a perfect approach but still might be useful according to your purpose.
There is a chapter I coauthored in a book dedicated to this topic: check out the book "Urban Evolutionary Biology". Chapter entitled "how to quantify urbanization when testing for urban evolution?" (Szulkin et al. 2020, DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198836841.003.0002) describes several methods you can apply in this case. I hope this helps!
The role of biodiversity in order to protect and restore native biodiversity that has been abused, as well as the proper use of the method of measuring the status of biodiversity using CBI indicators in order to create ecological services that are habitable.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Phytochemistry
- Extracts