#BiodiversitySensitive #UrbanDesign
Biodiversity focused design protocols in urban planning and development
by Peter Miles, Mar 30, 2022
"The cooling benefits of the greening of urban areas probably need little introduction and are widely known to help improve human physical and psychological health.
"Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design (BSUD), is a protocol with the aim of transforming urban areas to have increased habitat and food resources for native species and ecological communities.
"Biodiversity, or loss of biodiversity, has become an often-used descriptive term.
"A shortening of biological diversity, it refers to the sum of genetic diversity in an area. With one measure being the species diversity, ie, the number of different species.
"Speciation is the process of creating new species, and this leads to an increase in biodiversity.
"Urban biodiversity generally refers to the remnant of plant and animal species left after the impact of developing a built environment, eg buildings, and roads.
"By attempting to understand the changes caused by urbanization, and what was previously living in an area, from remnants, we can try and predict revegetation species and species density, and animal requirements to attract birds and animals from surrounding remnant habitats.
"BSUD is a new approach to on-site biodiversity conservation and restoration in urban areas (Garrard et al., 2018), to encourage an increase in biodiversity, to be larger in area, including in much of the urban matrix, and together with help from engaged residents leading to an overall biodiversity increase."
[...]
"Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design is a useful tool in establishing more biodiversity in urban areas with 5 main principles:
- Maintain and introduce habitat by revegetation with local species.
- Enable spread of plants and animals, eg by allowing bare soil for burrowing insects and seed germination, control of weeds, and removal of fences.
- Minimize threats and human disturbances, eg herbicide drift, foot traffic, off-leash dogs.
- Allow natural ecological processes, maybe as simple as letting dead logs remain, through to periodic burning.
- Provide for an increase in positive human and natural interaction, eg bird hides, but also no access islands, and no dog areas (Kirk et al., 2021)."
Read more (registration required):
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/biodiversity-sensitive-urban-design-77089ed97d45
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/5allx
#Rewilding #Australia #SolarPunkSunday #Revegetation #BSUD #NativeSpecies #Restoration #BiodiversitySensitiveUrbanDesign #UrbanBiodiversity
