What is BiodiverCities about?

BiodiverCities is funded by Biodiversa's BiodivTransform call.

The project uses mixed qualitative–quantitative methods across the social and natural sciences. It is participatory, collaborative, and grounded in multi-sector engagement. Over three years we will generate new empirical data in each of our four case study cities, including: surveys; semi-structured interviews; analyses of neighbourhood Facebook groups and local news; spatio-temporal encounter mapping; encounter narratives; wildlife-disturbance reports; and integrated community occupancy models.

Finally, we scale up these results across cities using, among other things, structural equation modelling and cross-case thematic synthesis.

The project is organized into four work packages:

• WP1 – Horizon Scan: Synthesizing existing knowledge and identifying key gaps.
• WP2 – Data Collection: Mapping human–wildlife interactions in cities.
• WP3 – Synthesis: Clustering and comparing insights to articulate components of an interspecies etiquette.
• WP4 – Action: Translating findings into decision-support tools and policy recommendations.

Cross-city approach as innovation

Urban studies and human–wildlife conflict research have long been limited by single-city perspectives. Yet cities worldwide are becoming more similar in infrastructure, lifestyles, and even in the “frequent five” species most commonly encountered. Our comparative design allows us to generate insights that go well beyond local contexts.

Our city cases, Stockholm, Genk, Freiburg, and Cape Town, represent different wildlife “protagonists” (from invasive racoons to wild boar to baboons), community dynamics, and are in different phases of wildlife exposure in their cities: from first encounters and initial enthusiasm and resistance, to backlash and polarisation, onto different pathways to management. These cities also illustrate recurring tropes found across both highly urbanized and biodiversity-rich regions: species becoming overabundant and perceived as pests, deep care for charismatic but ecologically problematic animals like invasive species, threatened species finding refuge in urban spaces and human carers, and resistance to or acceptance of lethal control and habituation practices.

Interspecies etiquette as framework

Our interspecies etiquette has three major analytical components:

• Wildlife literacy: Practical and conceptual understanding of species, ecological interactions, and urban environments.
• Relationality: Recognition of human–wildlife co-adaptation and the ways cities both shape and are shaped by animal behaviour and population dynamics.
• Stewardship: The forms of attention, care, responsibility, and management—by residents, communities, and cities—that influence coexistence.

The term “interspecies etiquette” comes from one of our informants, a municipal wildlife culler in Stockholm, who argued that city residents need a basic literacy about urban nature: including clear do’s and don’ts. This can be read in the article Natural Born Cullers: How hunters police the more-than-human right to the city. We build on this insight while extending it to include the adaptive strategies also of wildlife toward people.

Adaptation to city living goes both ways

Urban animals continuously learn and adjust—becoming more nocturnal to avoid humans, exploiting abandoned spaces, abiding by traffic flows, singing at higher pitches over noise, or finding new feeding niches. These are forms of synurbanisation, where animals learn “the rules of the game” in the city. But what exactly are these rules? Who sets them? How are they negotiated?

Following our interspecies etiquette, BiodiverCities treats adaptation to city living as bidirectional and co-created, moving beyond approaches that locate problems solely in human behaviour or solely in animal behaviour.

 In this way, interspecies communication in the city is crucial to the project - how such an etiquette can be communicated and enforced between species.