Dave Kendal

• Director at Future in Nature pty ltd

Narrm‐Melbourne, Australia, has been at the forefront of urban biodiversity research, planning and management for 50 years in urban landscapes that have many endemic and threatened species and remnant ecosystems. Yet a range of emerging social and ecological challenges are emerging that must be addressed for Narrm‐Melbourne to continue to be a lead...

With increasing focus on the importance of integrating nature spaces and nature-based solutions into our cities, what are the key priorities and pathways for action in Australian cities? Australia, a highly urbanised settler colonial country, has a rich biodiversity and cultural heritage, the result of thousands of years of custodianship and care f...

Nature-based solutions are informed by how communities think about nature. However, research on how urban communities think about urban nature is seldom carried out across urban contexts. In doing so it can be useful to select specific aspects of urban nature, such as urban forests and urban trees. Our study responds to these needs by measuring the...

This systematic review aims to investigate how urban living influences the microbiome of wildlife. We included all studies that compared the bacterial communities of non-human vertebrate wildlife living inside vs outside cities, and/or across an urbanisation gradient. We found that the effect of urban-living on bacterial diversity and community com...

While urban trees can be important determinants of human health and wellbeing in world cities, the specific influence of nearby urban trees upon human wellbeing has not been adequately explored. While many studies have associated urban greenery abundance with wellbeing scores, many measures of urban greenery do not specify the type of vegetation or...

As keystone structures in urban ecosystems, trees are critical to addressing many of the current livability, health, and environmental challenges facing cities. Every day, trees are removed from urban landscapes as part of routine management. These tree removals are an opportunity for implementing manipulative experiments to directly measure the so...

Deciding whether to plant native or non-native trees in public urban green spaces is becoming complex and conflicted, and decisions purely based on biotic nativeness are likely to be hamstrung as climate change and rising urban heat push many native species beyond their natural ranges. Importantly, tree selection considerations by urban planners an...

Given the prevalence of common and threatened bird species within cities, more research is necessary to determine human attitudes to urban birds and how this may affect conservation in urban areas In Australia, few studies have considered the impact of human attitudes on birds; those that have focused primarily on particular species. In this study,...

Experimentally manipulating urban tree abundance and structure can help explore the complex and reciprocal interactions among people, biodiversity and the services urban forests provide to humans and wildlife. In this study we take advantage of scheduled urban tree removals to experimentally quantify the benefits that urban trees provide to humans...

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are emerging as an approach to sustainable environmental management and addressing environmental and social issues in ways that benefit human well-being and biodiversity. NbS have been applied to social-environmental challenges such as climate change and urbanization, but with diverse conceptualisations and applications...

Just as ecological degradation contributes to many public health problems, restoration of these areas can be health-enabling not only for the environment but also for people. However, despite growing recognition of the positive relationships between ecological restoration and human health, knowledge gaps persist. Rural areas are most closely affect...

Across the world, planning and decision-making for urban forests increasingly seeks to include diverse perspectives. Yet, research on people’s perceptions of urban forests and urban trees is fragmented. To integrate and critically analyse this body of research, we conducted a review of empirical studies about people’s perceptions of urban forests a...

Environmental risk factors specific to urban areas lead to urban-associated diseases such as allergies, asthma and mental health disorders. To address these diseases, there has been a shift towards using urban nature as a preventative and therapeutic tool to restore and enhance human wellbeing.

The quantity of urban forests in cities is critical for biodiversity conservation and human health, and is known to be distributed unequally. Increasingly, the quality of urban forests are also being recognised as shaping the benefits they provide. Previous studies and reviews have demonstrated that the quality of urban green spaces is associated w...

A better understanding of the physical activity (PA) infrastructure in schools, the walkability of neighborhoods close to schools, and the food environments around schools, particularly in rural, socioeconomically challenged areas such as the North-West (NW) of Tasmania, could be important in the wider effort to improve the health of school-age chi...

The success of urban forest management strategies is dependent on public support for and engagement with urban trees. Satisfaction with urban trees and their management, and the level of trust people have in urban tree managers, are useful for understanding public opinions. Yet these concepts, and the mechanisms leading to the formation of public o...

Management decisions that do not adequately align with the values and opinions of the public-at-large can lead to controversy and conflict. In conservation and natural resource management, knowledge of the public's values and opinions are often assumed or based on the personal perceptions of experts, rather than on empirical evidence. Mismatches ca...

Australia is experiencing mounting pressures related to processes of urbanisation, biodiversity loss and climate change felt at large in cities. At the same time, it is cities that can take the leading role in pioneering approaches and solutions to respond to those coupling emergencies. In this perspective piece we respond to the following question...

The success of urban forestry depends on community support and engagement. How satisfied is the community with their urban trees is a useful way to understand these processes. However, public perception is complex and depends on a wide array of cognitive factors. How these factors relate and influence people’s level of satisfaction with urban trees...

Urban trees are increasingly being used to help cities adapt to climate change, improve health and wellbeing, and promote biodiversity. Yet these benefits are distributed unequally, mirroring the uneven distribution of the urban forest in many cities. Contrasting theories have been proposed to explain these observed patterns that focus either on th...

Background: Publication and co-authorship rates have been increasing over decades. In response, calls are being made to restrict the number of publications included in research evaluations. Yet there is little evidence to guide publication expectations and inform research evaluation for early career researchers (ECRs). Methods: Here we examine the...

Prevalence of physical inactivity and obesity continues to increase in regional areas such as North-West (NW) Tasmania and show no signs of abating. It is possible that limited access to physical activity infrastructure (PAI) and healthier food options are exacerbating the low levels of habitual physical activity and obesity prevalence in these com...

The idea of which species are native, based on their biogeographic origin, is central to many policies and programmes. Yet definitions are contested and the meanings of ‘nativeness’ are often complex and confusing for many people. For example, a plant that would be considered 'native' in Australia might have a native bioregion that is thousands of...

Urban trees are recognized as critical for biodiversity, health, well-being, and climate-adaptation. As trees age and increase in size, they provide more significant benefits, such as cooling and shade. While many cities have ambitious plans to increase tree numbers and canopy cover, cities also struggle to maintain and increase tree numbers. This...

Human-wildlife conflicts are a growing phenomenon globally as human populations expand and wildlife interactions become more commonplace. While these conflicts have been well-defined in terrestrial systems, marine forms are less well-understood. As concerns grow for the future of many shark species it is becoming clear that a key to conservation su...

Executive Summary: Urban street trees are recognised as being important to people and wildlife in Ballarat, but not a lot is known about how trees contribute to social and biodiversity benefits. To help fill this gap, a research group led by the University of Melbourne has partnered with the City of Ballarat to quantify the social and ecological...

As the world is increasingly urbanized, cities face critical challenges to supporting human wellbeing, biodiversity conservation, and climate resilience. Many of these challenges can be addressed by urban forest conservation and enhancement initiatives. Urban forests provide many ecosystem services, such as temperature regulation, increased wildlif...

Many world cities have plans to increase tree numbers and canopy cover. However, cities often struggle to articulate the social and ecological benefits of urban trees. Advances in experimental socio-ecological research are needed to understand the combined social and ecological benefits of urban trees. Experimentally measuring the ecological and so...

To ensure that cities and urban ecosystems support human wellbeing and overall quality of life we need conceptual frameworks that can connect different scientific disciplines as well as research and practice. In this perspective, we explore the potential of a traits framework for understanding social-ecological patterns, dynamics, interactions, and...

Technology is transforming societies worldwide. A major innovation is the emergence of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS), which have the potential to revolutionize cities for both people and nature. Nonetheless, the opportunities and challenges associated with RAS for urban ecosystems have yet to be considered systematically. Here, we report th...

Technology is transforming societies worldwide. A major innovation is the emergence of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS), which have the potential to revolutionize cities for both people and nature. Nonetheless, the opportunities and challenges associated with RAS for urban ecosystems have yet to be considered systematically. Here, we report th...

The evidence base for the benefits of urban nature for people and biodiversity is strong. However, cities are diverse and the social and environmental contexts of cities are likely to influence the observed effects of urban nature, and the application of evidence to differing contexts. To explore biases in the evidence base for the effects of urban...

This report investigates the opportunities for threatened species conservation within Australian cities and towns

Anthropogenic derived environmental change is challenging earth’s biodiversity. To implement effective management, it is imperative to understand how organisms are responding over broad spatiotemporal scales. Collection of these data is generally beyond the budget of individual researchers and the integration and sharing of ecological data and asso...

Campus community gardens (CCGs) can potentially improve student health and wellbeing, mitigate social and ecological problems, and nurture university-community relationships. However, CCGs are located in complex socio-political and ecological settings and many community gardens struggle or fail. However, few studies have assessed the socio-politica...

Decisions about urban forests are critical to urban liveability and resilience. This study aimed to evaluate the range of positions held by urban forest managers from local governments in the state of Victoria, Australia, regarding the management and governance challenges that affect their decision-making. This study was based on a Q-method approac...

Bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms in the environment (i.e., environmental microbiomes) provide vital ecosystem services and affect human health. Despite their importance, public awareness of environmental microbiomes has lagged behind that of human microbiomes. A key problem has been a scarcity of research demonstrating the microbial connec...

Urbanization is a major driver of environmental change and is closely linked to the future of biodiversity. Cities can host a high richness of plants and animals, and this urban biodiversity supports multiple regulating, provisioning and cultural ecosystem services. Developing biodiversity-friendly cities is thus inextricably linked to sustainable...

Peri-urban dynamics are challenging the sustainability of Australian cities. Peri-urban areas represent transition points of planning regimes and governance structures and processes between urban and rural spaces, usually characterized by intensified growth patterns and fast expansion of urban physical elements. These dynamics challenge the impleme...

Natural grasslands are threatened globally. In south-eastern Australia, remnants of critically endangered natural grasslands are increasingly being isolated in urban areas. Urbanisation has led to reduced fire frequency and woody plant encroachment in some patches. Grasslands are currently being managed under the assumption that desirable managemen...

Management of charismatic, locally overabundant, wildlife such as koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) and kangaroos (Macropus spp.) has led to public outcry on multiple occasions. While this public opinion has been influencing decision-making, evidence on what the general public thinks to support this decision-making has been largely lacking. Here we...

ContextLand use change requires measuring shifting patterns in biodiversity at various spatial scales to inform landscape management. Assessing vegetation change at different scales is challenging in urban ecosystems managed by many individuals. Thus, we do not know much about the structure and function of green spaces that support biodiversity.Obj...

Awareness of the benefits of urban trees has led many cities to develop ambitious targets to increase tree numbers and canopy cover. Policy instruments that guide the planning of cities recognize the need for new governance arrangements to implement this agenda. Urban forests are greatly influenced by the decisions of municipal managers, but there...

Many cities face a struggle to reconcile ambitious tree canopy cover targets with urban development pressures. Canopy cover in The City of Melbourne, Australia, which has a target of 40% canopy cover on public land by 2040, was analysed together with individual tree removal data, with particular focus on how many street trees were removed near majo...

Many Australian cities have ambitious targets to increase tree numbers and canopy cover, but they also remove many urban trees every year. This is because many large, old trees pose a hazard to human safety and hinder construction activities, and hence are often removed. However, the services that trees provide are more significant as trees age and...

The underinsurance of property is pervasively and persuasively promoted as an indicator of risk and riskiness and, in Western nations, is assumed to be aligned with socio-economic disadvantage. Yet, the solution – in its most simple form, buying more insurance – lacks critical interrogation of what the problem actually is. To understand underinsura...

Despite rich theorisation on the structure and content of people’s values and great interest in the concept of value change, there is currently little coordinated understanding of how people’s values might shift over time. This paper draws upon different value traditions in a multi-level framework that articulates possible pathways of value change...

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tens...

This special feature provides an impression of the plurality of social values for sustainability, taking into account theoretical traditions within mainstream and heterodox economics; positive, social and environmental psychology; human geography; anthropology; sociology; religious and indigenous studies and business management. Papers in this issu...

Urban gardens are a model system for understanding the intersection between biodiversity conservation and citizen science. They contain high plant diversity that contributes to urban flora. However, this diversity is challenging to document due to site access and complex plant taxonomy with hybrids and cultivars. Community research participation pr...

Cities across the world increasingly reflect the ethno-cultural diversity of a globalized society. How people interact with, and experience urban nature varies with the form, structure, and function of the space, but also with peoples’ ethno-cultural identity. In this study, we investigated the values that gardeners and park users of different ethn...

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce the concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the n...

Green spaces are believed to enhance the well-being of residents in urban areas. While there is research exploring the emotional benefits of green spaces, most early works are based on user surveys and case studies, which are typically small in scale, intrusive, time-intensive and costly. In contrast to earlier works, we utilize a non-intrusive met...

Nature-based solutions offer an exciting prospect for resilience building and advancing urban planning to address complex urban challenges simultaneously. In this article, we formulated through a coproduction process in workshops held during the first IPCC Cities and Climate Science Conference in Edmonton, Canada, in March 2018, a series of synthes...

Climatically similar regions may experience different temperature extremes and weather patterns that warrant global comparisons of local microclimates. Urban agroecosystems are interesting sites to examine the multidimensional impacts of climate changes because they rely heavily on human intervention to maintain crop production under different and...

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, including religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce the concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the...

Urban trees are critical for the future of sustainable cities. While many cities have ambitious targets to increase tree-canopy cover, many municipal governments also spend millions of dollars planting and maintaining urban trees every year. The services that trees provide are more significant as trees age and increase in size. However, large, old...

Municipalities are setting targets for increasing street tree species diversity to support resilience and enhance the supply of ecosystem services from the urban forest. Assessments of street tree composition and structure, and consequent vulnerability to the stresses of urban climate change, pests and disease offer guidance for such targets. Howev...

Urban environments are being subject to increasing temperatures due to the combined effects of global climate change and urban heat. These increased temperatures, coupled with human planting preferences and green space management practices, influence how urban plants grow and survive. Urban community gardens are an increasingly popular land use, an...

How do you feel about koalas? Do you think they are cute and cuddly? A good ambas-sador for Australia? Or just another animal in the world, no different to others? What about a pest animal? Understanding people’s opinions is increasingly important in conservation, as public opinion shapes what managers can and cannot do. When we surveyed people acr...

Over the last 20 years, there has been a notable increase in the presence of flying-foxes (Pteropodidae) in urban areas in Australia. Flying-foxes congregate during the day in camps which at times may contain many thousands of individuals. The associated noise, smell, mess and concerns about disease transmission can result in significant conflict w...

Green spaces are believed to improve the well-being of users in urban areas. While there are urban research exploring the emotional benefits of green spaces, these works are based on user surveys and case studies, which are typically small in scale, intrusive, time-intensive and costly. In contrast to earlier works, we utilize a non-intrusive metho...

Article impact: Understanding the role of social license informs managers and policy makers of community support and acceptance of conservation actions.

Urban trees are increasingly being recognized as critical for the future of sustainable cities. Many cities have ambitious targets to increase tree-canopy cover. The success of these initiatives depends on understanding how people make decisions about urban forests based on their values, preferences, scientific evidence, and social needs. However,...

Forests in cities produce goods and generate ecosystem services that improve the well-being of citizens and increase the resilience of cities to shocks.

Aim Urban macroecology studies can provide important insights into the impacts of climate change and human intervention in ecosystems. Current theory predicts that urban trees are constrained by temperature in very cold climates but not in other climates. Here we predict the climatic niche variables of planted urban tree populations from the realiz...

While wildlands are increasingly being transformed into managed ecosystems in rural areas around the world, cities are now also being recognized for their “wilderness” areas. Cities and wilderness have a complex relationship based on constantly changing human-nature interactions and social values. Therefore, understanding the complex nature of the...

There has been much debate about the effectiveness of different sized reserves for nature conservation. However, in human-dominated landscapes such as cities, conservation reserve systems are, by necessity, often determined without using conservation planning principles. This can result in reserve systems that are small, fragmented and disconnected...

Threatened species programs need a social license to justify public funding” (Zander et al. 2014). Or do they? There is growing acceptance within conservation science that community support for and engagement in ecosystem management programs is likely to lead to better conservation outcomes (Marvier & Wong 2012). However, the language used to chara...

In sustainability science calls are increasing for humanity to (re-)connect with nature, yet no systematic synthesis of the empirical literature on human–nature connection (HNC) exists. We reviewed 475 publications on HNC and found that most research has concentrated on individuals at local scales, often leaving ‘nature’ undefined. Cluster analysis...

There is global interest in increasing the complexity of urban ecosystems to benefit both people and nature in cities. However, to successfully plan for and manage more complex landscapes greater attention is needed on understanding the complementary role of different types of green spaces in cities. Wild spaces occur in many forms across the lands...

Landscape preferences shape decision-making and drive the ecological outcomes of urban landscapes. We investigate how people’s landscape preferences are shaped by the green space context (public park vs private residential garden landscapes) and by physical features such as vegetation complexity. A postal questionnaire was sent to households near s...

Question How does urbanization and associated declines in fire frequency alter the floristic composition of native temperate grasslands? Does it lead to: (1) biotic homogenization, i.e. compositional similarity between remnants increases; (2) biotic differentiation, whereby similarity between remnants declines, or; (3) clustered differentiation, wh...

Garden plants have become a target in conservation science discourse, particularly the notion that they ‘jump the garden fence’ to become weeds. This paper synthesises findings of a suite of projects exploring the ‘culture of weeds’ through different disciplinary lenses. Together they agree that while home gardens sometimes contain plants known to...

We studied urban vegetation at the landscape scale for one hundred cities and its relation to sociodemographic and climate • The landscape metrics best describing urban vegetation structure: amount, fragmentation and distribution of green cover • The climate and socioeconomic context relates to the degree of fragmentation and amount of urban vegeta...

Urban tree canopy cover (UTC) is a simple, and common, measure of urban forest resource. Urban infill development is likely to lead to losses in UTC under private tenure, at a time when local governments are setting ambitious targets to increase UTC overall. Simple, statistically rigorous methods are required to benchmark and track change in UTC, w...

Since the Neolithic period, humans have surrounded themselves and their settlements with ornamental plants. Why? This paper explores this question using the theory of mutualism, which refers to a biological process where different species interact to the benefit of both. The paper first describes how ornamental plants are understood in contemporary...

Habitat fragmentation is a global ecosystem threat, with biotic homogenisation a key predicted outcome, whereby similarity in species composition increases across space. We examined changes in the floristic composition of native endangered grasslands in Victoria over the past two decades. Sixty-three rural grasslands, with a long history of frequen...

Preferences for landscapes are critical because they can drive landscape changes over time. The mediating role of wildlife value orientations in influencing preferences for urban wetlands through the provision of ecological information (based on insectivorous bats) was experimentally tested. Residents (N = 198) were asked about their preferences fo...