Publications

Thomas Elmqvist, Pippin Anderson, Erik Andersson, Vanesa Castan Broto, Tao Liu, Timon McPhearson, Anjal Prakash, Christopher Raymond, Patricia Romero-Lankao, Suneetha M. Subramanian, Xiaoling Zhang. 2026. Urban sustainability science: from adaptation to regeneration on the road to 2050. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00362-9

When npj Urban Sustainability was launched in 2021, we framed urbanization as one of the defining processes of the Anthropocene—a process that drives global change, but which also opens opportunities for sustainability action 1 . Now, alongside the 5th anniversary of the journal, we reflect on the state of urban sustainability research and the knowledge gaps that we would like our community to address to support local and...

Erik Andersson, Martin Ávila, Nelly Mäekivi. 2026. Wilding Practices Through Design: Playful Encounters for Reframing Control in Multispecies Cohabitation. Diseña. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.28.Article.1

This article explores how design can reintroduce elements of wildness into urban environments through artifacts that foster multispecies interaction. Wildness is not defined as a return to nature, but as a relational and semiotic rupture of control. It is an opportunity for nonhuman agency to emerge within human-managed spaces. Drawing on theories of affordances, play, cultural heritage, and metacommunication, we investigate h...

Mairéad O’Donnell, Melissa Pineda-Pinto, Erik Andersson, Marcus Collier. 2026. From control to cohabitation: Social-ecological insights on urban wildness narratives. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2026.129279

Narratives surrounding urban green space management have experienced significant shifts in recent years. While the command-and-control approach to urban green space management was once a dominant narrative, alternative understandings have emerged over time. The emerging narrative on urban wilding presents a unique opportunity to expand on our current understandings and approaches to urban green space management. This research ...

Matthew Dennis, Jonathan Huck, Claire Holt, Ewan McHenry, Erik Andersson, Sonali Sharma, Dagmar Haase. 2026. In search of Schrödinger’s patch: a functional approach to habitat delineation. Landscape Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-025-02291-x

The effective delineation of habitat is crucial for understanding drivers of habitat loss and fragmentation, and their effects on biodiversity outcomes at local to global scales. The concept of the habitat patch is central to this process but presents both theoretical and methodological challenges related to the seemingly irreconcilable tendency of habitat to simultaneously exhibit characteristics of both gradation and aggrega...

Matthew Dennis, Jonathan Huck, Claire Holt, Ewan McHenry, Erik Andersson, Sonali Sharma, Dagmar Haase. 2026. Beyond the patch: leveraging functional habitat delineation in fragmentation-biodiversity research. Landscape Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-025-02290-y

Theoretical and methodological developments in the field of fragmentation-biodiversity research continue to rely on the central concept of the habitat patch where patch size and number are considered particularly relevant to spatially structured ecological communities. However, although great interest has been shown in the effects of habitat fragmentation, appropriate methods for the spatial delineation of habitat have not rec...

Amin Rastandeh, Sara Borgström, Catherine Marina Pickering, Anna B. Miller, Davide Geneletti, Ryo Kohsaka, Jeff Rose, Amalia Engström, Erik Andersson, Anton Stahl Olafsson, Dagmar Haase. 2025. Priorities for peri-urban recreation ecology research, policy, and practice in a transforming world. Landscape Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-025-02263-1

Peri-urban landscapes are increasingly expected to support both outdoor recreation and biodiversity conservation. Different trade-offs and potential synergies between these two objectives call for a clear, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive framework for the design, management, and stewardship of such landscapes to better support outdoor recreation and biodiversity conservation. The aim of this work was to explore the most ...

Martín Ávila, Nelly Mäekivi, Erik Per Göran Andersson. 2025. Designing for multispecies affordances. Nordic design research conference. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.73

This workshop will engage participants in an exercise that conceives experimental design practices that involve communication with other-than-human species. The process encourages a shift away from human-centred control, creating conditions that allow other species to manifest their own behaviours. This is important since the dominant global material culture of design does not acknowledge the presence and interaction of other ...

Carolin Seiferth, Erik Andersson, Maria Tengö. 2025. The role of relational learning in knowledge co-production. People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.70116

1. Learning, and how we learn, is integral for the governance of complex social-ecological systems. With the growing interest in knowledge co-production comes a need to further study how to better enable learning between different actors engaged in dialogue-based processes. 2. We use an empirical case of a workshop series centred on collaborative water and landscape governance on Sweden, to explore how a process partly design...

Erik Andersson, Romina Martin, Pippin Anderson, Shirley Brooks, Gonzalo Cortés Capano, Alberto González-García, Viola Hakkarainen, Marion Jay, Sandra Lavorel, Margot Neyret, Tobias Plieninger, Christopher M Raymond. 2025. Resilient Biodiversity Conservation: Working with Social–Ecological Connections to Navigate Crises. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf156

Biodiversity conservation needs to adjust and keep adjusting to changing conditions. This is largely a matter of connections—across land uses, between people and the landscapes they inhabit, and between sectors and governance levels. Connections play an important role in shaping landscape dynamics and in the ability of conservation practitioners to be able to draw on resources outside their often limited mandates or authority....

Erik Andersson, Romina Martin, Pippin Anderson, Shirley Brooks, Gonzalo Cortes Capano, Alberto Gonzalez-Garcia, Viola Hakkarainen, Marion Jay, Sandra Lavorel, Margot Neyret, Tobias Plieninger, Christopher M. Raymond. 2025. Resilient Biodiversity Conservation. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf156

Biodiversity conservation needs to adjust and keep adjusting to changing conditions. This is largely a matter of connections-across land uses, between people and the landscapes they inhabit, and between sectors and governance levels. Connections play an important role in shaping landscape dynamics and in the ability of conservation practitioners to be able to draw on resources outside their often limited mandates or authority....