ABSTRACT
Biodiversity in urban landscapes is influenced by a series of sociocultural, political, and economic filters across time and space. However, people also have a diverse array of perceptions and experiences with urban biota (plants, animals, and other non-human life), which can structure management decisions that go on to shape the composition and configuration of the urban landscape mosaic. In this chapter, we introduce the multi-scalar framework to capture the complexity of interactions between people and biodiversity in the context of social-ecological, urban systems. We emphasize the iterative nature of the interactions between people and biota to go beyond the unidirectional effects of human activities that filter biodiversity, as well as mechanistic differences that emerge across various taxa and geographic contexts. Integrating social and ecological data in research, practice, and policy under a variety of contexts remains a key challenge in the field of urban ecology. Future research will benefit from applications of the multi-scalar framework to better understand the many ways that people influence, and are influenced by, local to regional biodiversity in urban landscapes.
