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141989-City-size bias in knowledge on the effects of urban nature on people and biodiversity.pdf (516.63 kB)

City-size bias in knowledge on the effects of urban nature on people and biodiversity

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The evidence base for the benefits of urban nature for people and biodiversity is strong. However, cities are diverse and the social and environmental contexts of cities are likely to influence the observed effects of urban nature, and the application of evidence to differing contexts. To explore biases in the evidence base for the effects of urban nature, we text-matched city names in the abstracts and affiliations of 14 786 journal articles, from separate searches for articles on urban biodiversity, the health and wellbeing impacts of urban nature, and on urban ecosystem services. City names were found in 51% of article abstracts and 92% of affiliations. Most large cities were studied many times over, while only a small proportion of small cities were studied once or twice. Almost half the cities studied also had an author with an affiliation from that city. Most studies were from large developed cities, with relatively few studies from Africa and South America in particular. These biases mean the evidence base for the effects of urban nature on people and on biodiversity does not adequately represent the lived experience of the 41% of the world’s urban population who live in small cities, nor the residents of the many rapidly urbanising areas of the developing world. Care should be taken when extrapolating research findings from large global cities to smaller cities and cities in the developing world. Future research should encourage research design focussed on answering research questions rather than city selection by convenience, disentangle the role of city size from measures of urban intensity (such as population density or impervious surface cover), avoid gross urban-rural dualisms, and better contextualise existing research across social and environmental contexts.

History

Publication title

Environmental Research Letters

Volume

15

Article number

124035

Number

124035

Pagination

1-9

ISSN

1748-9326

Department/School

School of Geography, Planning and Spatial Sciences

Publisher

Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd.

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Rights statement

Copyright 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Rural and remote area health

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