The Wild in the Streets. Urban Wildlife Information Network

Wildlife and biodiversity are important components of sustainable, healthy cities (Chamberlain et al., 2020; Lambert & Donihue, 2020; Lepczyk et al., 2017). Urban species generate many ecosystem services (Mace et al., 2012); for example, urban pollinators can help pollinate gardens and other plants (Hall et al., 2017), and urban nature provides recreational and aesthetic benefits (Kowarik, 2011). Being around urban wildlife can also improve human mental and physical health and build connections to the outdoors (Bell et al., 2018). While some species also create conflict with humans (Bombieri et al., 2018, Schell et al., 2021), these conflicts can often be mitigated with a deeper understanding of their behavior and ecology. Urban wildlife is thus critically important and worthy of study and conservation, but the field of urban wildlife biology is young, and some fundamentals are still poorly understood.

There are many gaps in our current understanding of urban wildlife. Most studies are conducted in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, leaving urban wildlife in the rest of the world poorly understood. Almost all studies investigate only a single species at a time, precluding ecological studies of relationships between them. The vast majority of studies are on birds and mammals, leaving herptiles, fish, and invertebrates desperately understudied. And critically, almost all studies take place in a single city, each researcher studying only their own metropolitan area, using their own unique methodology (Magle et al., 2012, Collins et al., 2021).

The single-city approach to urban wildlife research has created an interesting collection of case studies but has limited general urban conservation insight. Cities are extremely different from one another, varying in ecotype, elevation, aridity, economics, culture, structure, and countless other ways. If cities are so varied, what value can conservation gain from comparing them? Can policy makers, city planners, park managers, and others conserve biodiversity using research from another city? The single species studies that comprise current knowledge do not allow us to address how ecological and human factors in diverse and varied cities shape ecological communities at the scale of a region, a country, a continent, or our planet (Magle et al., 2019).  


The Urban Wildlife Information Network  
To overcome these limitations and move urban wildlife ecology beyond a patchwork of local studies, my colleagues and I created the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN, Magle et al., 2019)—an alliance of researchers working in different cities to collect urban wildlife data together using shared protocols. Each member collects their own data independently and retains the right to use it however they see fit, but also has the opportunity to work with other partners to ask and answer questions at much larger scales—from regionally to globally. So, for example, while previously we could only determine whether coyotes prefer cemeteries to golf courses in the city of Chicago, now we can broadly address which types of green space coyotes prefer across North America, which is much more useful as we create best management practices for urban wildlife management and coexistence worldwide. 

The initial UWIN design was created for the city of Chicago in the USA (population 2.5 million), where urban wildlife data collection has been conducted by the Lincoln Park Zoo since 2009 (Magle et al., 2016). The basic study design revolves around long-term data collection at field stations ranging from highly urbanized to less urbanized portions of a city, using passive detection techniques to reveal what green spaces in the city are found and used by specific species of wildlife. The initial concept for UWIN was developed around 2015, when the field protocols had been tested and refined for a five-year period. The Urban Wildlife Institute, which conducted the work in Chicago, had begun to interface with urban planners and architects and quickly learned that local data was not adequate to the task of helping create wildlife friendly cities around the world. The first few UWIN partners were located close to Chicago: Madison, Wisconsin (population 250 thousands) and Indianapolis, Indiana (population 850 thousands). For the first few years the network was largely restricted to the Midwest region of the United States, but it quickly began to spread around the country. In 2018 several partnering cities in Canada joined, and in 2021 UWIN added two partners in Germany and one in South Africa. At the time of this writing UWIN has 47 partnering cities in four countries (see map) and is continuing to expand. Members represent organizations that include universities, non-profit conservation organizations, governmental organizations, and more. 

Map of current UWIN Partners (September, 2022)
Source: UWIN, 2022.

Strengths of UWIN
One of the main strengths of UWIN is our systematic protocols. UWIN uses flexible but rigorous study designs (accessible at https://www.urbanwildlifeinfo.org/), allowing partners in different cities to collect data using the same protocols at the same times of year, enabling statistical comparison of our results. Partners of UWIN work together to create study designs that can be adapted to different cities—every city is built differently, with different landforms, water features, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans, and as such, study designs are not identical. We work with statisticians and data collection specialists to build protocols that allow for straightforward and rigorous comparisons that are still flexible enough to be adapted to a huge variety of urban and urbanizing regions, including massive metropolises such as New York City (population eight million), and also smaller cities such as Wilmington, Delaware (population 70 thousands). 

Working together provides numerous strengths—most obviously, it allows us to scale up our inquiries. Cities, as previously noted, are very different, and so hypotheses about urban wildlife are likely supported or rejected depending on the system (in our case the city) where they are studied (Vellend, 2016). It isn’t surprising that the context of our studies matters. Spatial or temporal variation in the relative fitness of species, and therefore patterns of biodiversity, is everywhere in nature. When we begin to recognize that cities are not carbon copies of one another it becomes clear that multi-city research is imperative to add a regional, continental, or global perspective to urban ecology (Aronson et al., 2016).

The network has also benefitted from strong ongoing collaborations with local landowners, advocacy groups, educational organizations, and other institutions interested in nature conservation. Because our design calls for long-term data collection in many types of neighborhoods across each city where we work, it is imperative that we make connections and partnerships, and these partnerships yield massive rewards in the form of new collaborations and insights. Reaching into each community takes us out of the ivory tower and into the neighborhoods where wildlife contacts and conflicts occur. Local partners and experts can also make use of the data we collect, such that the network benefits go far beyond our own members.

UWIN is designed with a democratic-style structure where each member city has an equal vote on whether to approve multi-city research proposals, and each also has sole discretion on whether to contribute their data to a given project. In fact, each partner has complete control over their own data and can publish or publicize it without any involvement of other network members. The network meets quarterly via conference call and keeps in touch via e-mail and a Slack channel, and individual members can become as involved or uninvolved as they wish with the inner workings of UWIN. The intent is that membership in UWIN adds very few additional administrative hurdles or tasks to its members, while providing access to massive datasets and expertise that would be otherwise impossible.

As UWIN has grown, we have created many active committees on specific topics ranging from technology to environmental justice, to outreach, to education, to specific species and taxa. These committees have enabled us to address new and emerging topics and focus the expertise and experience of network members onto specific aspects of urban wildlife and human-wildlife interactions. UWIN represents the largest urban wildlife research project ever conducted, and its members the largest ever consortium of urban wildlife researchers. As such, our network contains members with specific expertise in a vast number of related skills and disciplines, such as statistics, spatial analysis, natural history, human dimensions of wildlife, social science, landscape ecology, acoustic sampling, image analysis, and many, many more. At this point there are not many topics within ecology not represented by a UWIN member, and our combined and shared expertise is an enormous asset.

Weaknesses of UWIN 
However, UWIN is not without its weaknesses and limitations. Most critically, at present the spatial pattern of UWIN cities essentially mimics the pattern of existing urban wildlife research—a great deal of coverage in the northern part of North America, with very limited coverage elsewhere. Clearly, we will be unable to help build a wildlife-inclusive urban planet if our data come only from a small, and already over-represented, part of it. We are actively working to expand and add UWIN members in the Global South, especially rapidly urbanizing regions found in biodiversity hotspots (Weller et al., 2019). Doing so will likely mean providing equipment as well as expertise, and most likely drafting new protocols in collaboration with new local partners—it would be naïve to assume that study designs optimized for use in North America will be suitable everywhere.

Another current weakness of data collection in UWIN is that it is taxa-specific. At the time of this writing, all members are collecting data using camera traps, which are able to detect medium to large non-volant mammals including carnivores, mesocarnivores, and ungulates (Magle et al., 2016). While this is a fine place to start, as such species cause significant conflict, these taxa are already overrepresented in the literature and much more information is needed on understudied groups such as invertebrates, herptiles, and fish. Several subcommittees within UWIN are developing protocols for data collection on other species, and pilot projects are underway focused on songbirds (using AudioMoths, Hill et al., 2018), and ticks (using dragging techniques, Salomon et al., 2020). To be successful in the long term, UWIN will have to adopt protocols such as these and encourage a large number of partners to implement them. We cannot claim to understand urban wildlife as a whole if we only study a small subset of urban wildlife species. 

Current Findings 
While there is certainly a long way to go, we have already started to provide the data necessary to understand how among-city variability relates to differences in urban biodiversity. One key study showed that the distribution and relative scarcity of mammals varies as a function of that city’s average housing density and greenspace availability (Fidino et al., 2021). Another revealed that wealth plays an important role in shaping urban wildlife communities, which has implications for environmental justice as well as management (Magle et al., 2021). As mammals can generate conflict with humans, findings like these can help target efforts towards outreach, coexistence, and management at scales previously impossible. We are also able to assess basic questions of ecology at broader scales: recently UWIN members investigated how urban animals shift their daily activity patterns towards nocturnality (Gallo et al., 2022). As data are collected by UWIN members in an ongoing fashion, and have been for several years, we are well positioned to assess the impacts of large-scale events such as climate change (Lister et al., 2015), and unexpected catastrophes such as COVID-19. Our members have engaged in deep discussions on the potential impacts of this pandemic on wildlife behavior and distributions (Zellmer et al., 2021), discussions that are enhanced by their diverse expertise. One upcoming publication will directly assess the impacts of COVID-19 on wildlife species in more than 20 cities.
 
Outreach and Applications 
The advantages of the network also go beyond the realm of scientific inquiry. Because our data are collected so broadly, we have the power to project our findings to new situations and unsampled regions (Magle et al., 2019). This in turn gives us the ability to make broad-ranging recommendations as to how to conserve and manage wildlife in many kinds of urban and urbanizing regions. We can then connect with city planners, landscape architects, and developers to make recommendations for wildlife-friendly design, not based on vague ideas about green infrastructure or general principles of ecology but backed by real data from around the world. We strongly believe that on our rapidly changing world, cities must be part of the solution to the biodiversity crisis, and connecting science with the people who build, plan, and maintain those urban regions is a critical first step. 

In 2019, UWIN hosted a summit of scientists, planners, and architects to discuss steps towards a wildlife-inclusive urban future. We identified several barriers to overcome (Kay et al., 2021), but also made significant progress towards best practices. Our members ended the summit excited by the potential of a future where wildlife have a metaphorical seat at the table when decisions are made about how to build urban regions.

UWIN data is also useful for applied management applications. Human-wildlife interactions take place at all levels of organization, from migratory birds travelling through major metropolitan areas, to the animal that takes up residence in someone’s attic. In Chicago, we have integrated our expertise into the city’s wildlife management policies, ensuring that the most up-to-date scientific information is used when responding to a call about nuisance wildlife in a neighborhood. Working together with the city, and informed by all the data we’ve collected, we crafted the city’s Wildlife Management and Coexistence Plan, which has been useful in reducing conflicts in the city. But we also want the benefits of this plan to go far beyond Chicago. We drafted the plan as a template, so that other cities within UWIN or even beyond can modify it and adopt it themselves. Our network of partners each benefit from any advancement made within a member city, whether that be a scientific advancement or an on-the-ground application.

Our research has also greatly benefitted from interactions with students and teachers in the cities where we work. In Chicago, we created a program called Partners in Fieldwork where schools are given wildlife monitoring equipment such as camera traps and audio detectors, and training in how to use them. In time, the teachers and students can collect data on the grounds of the school in the same manner as we collect at other field sites, essentially making their school part of the study. At the same time, students who would not otherwise be aware of urban wildlife issues or, perhaps, careers in science, gain confidence and familiarity with data collection techniques and local nature. Several other cities within UWIN have created parallel programs, amplifying the impact of this initiative.
 
Future Directions 
UWIN continues to grow, adding new partnerships in new cities every year. As we look to the future, the possibilities for our combined study, the largest urban wildlife research project ever conducted, seem limitless. As we grow, it is critical that we work to overcome our limitations. To start, we must expand our reach beyond North America and continue to add partnerships in the Global South, in rapidly urbanizing regions, and in biodiversity hotspots (Weller et al. ,2019). In addition, we must add more taxa to our sampling regime, including understudied groups such as invertebrates, fish, reptiles, and amphibians (Collins et al., 2021). 

We want to ensure that the network is a force for positive change in the world—for wildlife, certainly, but for people as well. We have several upcoming publications looking at the impacts of systemic racism in the United States on wildlife distributions (Schell et al., 2020), as manifested by situations such as redlining and gentrification. In addition, while it isn’t the primary focus of our work, when we think about creating green space and wildlife habitat in cities, there is a natural linkage with wider societal issues such as sustainability and climate change. We must learn to live sustainably on our planet, and if urban wildlife corridors and buildings with smaller footprints can be a part of that solution while also helping us coexist with other species, so much the better.

UWIN is an unprecedented effort and must be an immense step towards changing the perception of cities in our conservation narrative. Traditionally, cities have played the role of the villain, obliterating all nature, a force to be stopped at all costs. A simplistic view, to be sure, though not without some basis in fact. Certainly, urbanization reduces biodiversity, and many species will never be able to reside in human-dominated landscapes. However, the fact remains that we cannot stop urbanization. As long as there are people on the planet and they need somewhere to live, our cities will grow and change. If we want to reach our conservation goals on our dynamic planet, we need to use every tool in our arsenal, including changing the way we think of cities: not as places devoid of nature, but as places where we build space for nature alongside people.

The final step for this network will be to harness our data towards a grand collaboration with landscape architects, urban planners, developers, and urban residents. Once we have a full understanding of urban wildlife ecology, including which species adapt, how behavior change, the mechanisms of persistence, and so on, we can create blueprints for urban areas that can be a boon for biodiversity, instead of a threat. This goal may be a long way off, but we will never reach it working in isolation. Only through collaborations like the UWIN can we realize a goal of a future where people and animals thrive together in cities around the world.

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