Scaling up from gardens: biodiversity conservation in urban environments

As urbanisation increases globally and the natural environment becomes increasingly fragmented, the importance of urban green spaces for biodiversity conservation grows. In many countries, private gardens are a major component of urban green space and can provide considerable biodiversity benefits. Gardens and adjacent habitats form interconnected networks and a landscape ecology framework is necessary to understand the relationship between the spatial configuration of garden patches and their constituent biodiversity. A scale-dependent tension is apparent in garden management, whereby the individual garden is much smaller than the unit of management needed to retain viable populations. To overcome this, here we suggest mechanisms for encouraging ‘wildlife-friendly’ management of collections of gardens across scales from the neighbourhood to the city.