 Good afternoon. My name is Alita Hernandez. I am an intended business major with a minor and environmental science and Spanish Something I love about Cal is the inclusivity and diversity found everywhere around campus Thank you to all of our generous donors without your constant support. We wouldn't be able to call ourselves the number one public university Dr. Krischal is an urban ecologist and assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management His research combines animal behavior Physiology and biodiversity science approaches to uncover how a million carnivores Adapt to life in cities. In addition his work uses environmental justice lens to help build more justice Biodiverse and resilient cities. Dr. Schell is a National Geographic Explorer a grist fixer and a Cal Academy research fellow with his work featured across PBS NPR the New York Times the Atlantic and various other outlets Please welcome professor Schell Can y'all hear me? Okay. Yeah Solid. Thank you all for joining for this lecture slash. I know it's probably extraordinarily hot outside So you wanted to come inside? I don't blame you. That was a boss move So before I get started on today's topic cities as a solution to the biodiversity crisis I first would like to begin with a land acknowledgement Before we begin this event We take a moment to recognize that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of the Huchin The ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking aloney people the successors of the sovereign Verona band of Alameda County This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma aloney tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona band We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefited and continues to benefit from the use and occupation Of this land since the institutions founding in 1868 Consistent with our values of community inclusion and diversity We have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples as Members of the Berkeley community It is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand But also we recognize that the Muwekma aloney people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today Which is certainly apropos because all of today's lecture is going to be us drilling into this one simple question Why cities right? Why cities? Why should we care about cities? Why should we say cities potentially are a solution rather than a problem to the many crises we face Certainly, I'm sure y'all have heard of the biodiversity crisis the climate crisis global capitalism Influencing all of that all together and it makes it feel overwhelming Right insurmountable like you don't have any power or agency to make any changes But to break the problem down so then that way we Demystify the process right make it feel like you actually have some agency We're gonna start with the cute and cuddly now Our lab studies all manner of organisms But certainly the flagship the avatar species for us in my lab are coyotes and urban coyotes in particular If you are curious These photos up here that you see no, they are not photoshopped. Yes. They're a real animal in 2007 right when I started my graduate career So, you know a decade and some change ago the longer I put this up the older I start to feel even though I'm not that old right and Apparently this coyote in downtown, Chicago Hopped into a Quiznos restaurant And when I mean hopped it sort of more like walked in like it owned the joint as it was walking in there were people eating sandwiches There are folks that are making sandwiches. They all stop what they're doing and then they slowly back out of the establishment while this coyote then proceeds to walk into the drink cooler and Stay in the drink cooler for 50 full minutes Animal care and control has to come in order to relocate the animal to the nearest nature preserve and You may be wondering how on earth did this coyote even get far enough into downtown, Chicago? And this is this is like on state Street y'all so for those of you that are familiar with Chicago, right? Below Whacker, this is very very urban This question is one that not only are we kind of chasing here at Berkeley But one that certainly is all over the place. Sorry, let me get rid of Spotify here There we go Not only are there coyotes and drink coolers in Chicago. There are coyotes on trains in Portland Up here. There are coyotes that get a slice of pizza every other week at Huntington Beach right here You can imagine that all of these Interactions with people with built environments with these constructed areas Ultimately lead to people and coyotes coming into conflict, right as you see here now our region is no different in fact We have several videos just to demonstrate what that looks like here in the city of San Francisco So this one video here was taken up near Bernal Heights by one of the students in the lab, Tolly Caspi, which he was doing fecal transit work So some of the work that we do is trying to understand what the animals are eating and you'll notice some really kind of striking Patterns and behavior here coyotes normally if they see you they like to be at least 20 feet away And they start walking in the other direction not this individual pair that with this video as well now this video is of a coyote taken in the Observatory area of Golden Gate Park can anybody hazard a guess as to what this animal is doing? Stalking yes stalking what look at how close those people are this is ridiculous Right, they're probably no more than five feet away Folks probably across the pond think that's a dog So yes, a lot of folks say ducks But it's not the ducks It's a child Yeah, that small child right there probably about four years old this coyote was infamous He got a nickname he was so infamous Carl and Carl the coyote was so brazen that he would be out at 11 a.m 12 p.m. 1 p.m. Normally when coyotes are trying to hide or sleep being incredibly cautious around people But Carl started stalking children Eventually, he was put down last year But when they did an autopsy on the animal they found that this animal was eating a lot of anthropogenic food Think garbage food waste in some instances. We've had videos from residents of San Francisco Where they're actively buying food stakes at a safe way or a luckies and then giving that food directly to the animal So our relationship with these animals sort of needs to be fixed Here are one of the big reasons why conflict is increasing over time So a recent paper that my post doc and I and several others in the lab just put together Compiled ten years of human coyote conflict data and Found that conflict is on the rise for a whole host of reasons because of the fact that the climate crisis is reducing the amount of water that's available or The continued urbanization that's constricting the amount of habitat available for these animals or the amount of food that we provide to them I Share this story with you because it highlights some quintessential tenants of urban ecology One of the biggest ones being that human beings are the directors and the audience of this adapted screenplay I like to joke that we are the Lin Manuel Miranda of this joint, right? Not only did we cast all the cast members composed all the songs we even put together that rotating stage Which is really cool, right? We're also acting in this play We're also seeing it as it unfolds and oftentimes Ecology of the past would have us stand outside of that narrative But we today are going to break that fourth wall so then that way I show y'all how critical it is We understand our place in this narrative and there is no better way to start that portion of the story Then with this handsome a dinosaur right here now I know all the y'all I sing Jurassic Park at this point some of y'all are younger and it came out before you were born I get it, but you have homework if you haven't done it already, right? first Jurassic Park in the movie Jeff Goldman's character Ian Malcolm Talks about how these dinosaurs will eventually find their way out of these man-made enclosures that we think are ironclad But really they're just toothpicks and one of the most famous lines. He says is that life? Finds a way right well for sure life is finding a way like those coyotes you just saw in Cities so much so that the coyotes aren't the only example We have Javalina in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona Raccoons in the Pacific Northwest smooth-coated otters in Singapore and everything in between What's remarkable about these adjustments to urban living is that we're now starting to find signatures of evolution So these animals are rapidly evolving to cope with the stressors that we have placed up against them and There are so many examples that it's hard to fit them all into slides I'll just show you many of the organisms and the most flashy examples to date Some of which include wall lizards developing more topads that is linked back to genetic traits showing their ability to climb more smooth surfaces or Rats in New York City for those of y'all that have been in Manhattan You'll know that uptown and downtown are very different from each other guess what the rats think so too So there are genetic populations that are distinct in the uptown portion in the downtown portion of Manhattan, and they don't cross right at 72nd Street And then yes, of course there is less genetic diversity for coyotes that exist in cities relative to those that are in non-urban areas now up to this point I've been giving y'all all of the feels about how Glorious it is that these wildlife are developing strategies to persist in environments that we thought were inhospitable to those wildlife species But it should be noted with these few success stories the larger narrative often is that we are in a crisis global biodiversity is Most certainly in a crisis and it helps to tell this story through the numbers So briefly the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services or IPBES Came out with a report in 2019 and part of that report states of an estimated eight million animal and plant species 75% of which are insects, which is really important right that insect base Helps to really structure the trophic or food webs that exist within our ecosystems Around one million one eighth of those species are threatened with extinction and Many of these charts, which I won't belabor the point about all of the information in each of them just to tell you that we're in trouble For those of you that remember Bill Nye the science guy I remember growing up watching Bill Nye and one of the most apropos Examples that he used of biodiversity within the ecosystem was his idea of thinking of species as Blocks in a Jenga set now your Jenga set is pretty structured and Foundationally sound when you have all the species inside of that Jenga set, but imagine you start to pull one Then two then three then more and more and more species You can start to see that this Jenga set gets a little bit more shaky and this analogy is Pretty substantial when thinking about where we are right now Our Jenga set is not where we need it to be and why is all of that important? Well, as you guys probably can see where I'm going with this Biodiversity is our shield selfishly We want to be able to stay alive and healthy on this planet for as long as possible Right and in order to do that We need to lean on all of our non human brethren in the process So biodiversity helps us to provide what are called these ecosystem services Whether they be cultural whether they be provisioning whether they be environmental health that allow us to sustain ourselves to sustain life Hence the reason that we have now started in the lab to think about the ways in which biodiversity Are linked back to public health Are linked back to ecosystem health and how what we do here not only in the present But what we've done in the past and what we do in the future is integral for us to continue so we understand the problem and This is a global one which is part of the reason why the Convention on Biological Diversity came together in 2022 to bring together this COP 15 initiative where you would have Officials from all over the world convene to think about ways that we can make decrees and targets to get to our Biodiversity goals so we stop losing so many species so we maintain that ecosystem stability and function and At the end of 2022 they came up with 23 decrees that We're hopefully going to serve as a means for us to get to where we need it to be Most of these under what's called the Kunming Montreal global biodiversity framework All talk about ways to reduce or halt how much biodiversity we are losing Things like reducing land and sea use change or restoration of degraded ecosystems or further down managing invasive alien species and reducing negative impact of pollution on biodiversity Now I could read all 23 for you and that probably would be a bore than all y'all would be asleep and we don't want that Right. So really what I want to bring to y'all's attention is an all 23 of these decrees all 23 of these itemized targets There is only one One on urban blue and green spaces. Some of y'all may be thinking. All right. So Why do we care? Well, let me give you some numbers first things first Land use change and direct species exploitation are number one and two in terms of how important and impactful they are In the biodiversity crisis So a lot of folks seeing results like this would say, okay, then definitely urbanization and development Has to be figured out. We have to figure out solutions to one of the number one threats to all the biodiversity on the planet and most folks would then jump to the conclusion that somehow The assumption is urban areas are evil And because of the way in which we have developed in the past which there is a lot of legitimacy to that, right? Our practices of urban development From the past up to the present have resulted in a whole host of negative consequences Whether it be noise pollution artificial light at night air and water pollution more invasive species so on and so on and so on But if you were to believe that then you would fall into what's called the biological deserts fallacy this idea that somehow the cities are completely devoid of nature But that's not true at all. Let me show you why First it's important to situate ourselves in this narrative more than half So 55 percent and climbing Of the human population lives in cities Here this quick map just briefly shows from 2020 and this is already again increased The proportion of folks that live in cities with the majority of people especially in north america All living in urban centers Right, so most of the people that we are thinking about when we're thinking about human wildlife interactions live in urban areas Okay, well, that's fact number one fact number two the amount of new urban land cover So that's spaces that have not been urbanized yet Are projected to increase by 0.82 to 1.53 million kilometers squared Maybe like chris. I don't know what that means at all. Can you please give me some context? Yeah, sure California the entire state of california is 0.42 million kilometers squared So the amount of new urbanized land new urbanized land across the globe is going to be at least Two times the size of the state of california Two times the size of the largest state in the contiguous 48 states That's a lot Not only that right the world's known biodiversity hotspots the areas that have the greatest abundance of new and diverse species 422 major cities. So having 300,000 people or more Are situated in these spaces. We are no different We're right there, right? Los angeles the bay area sacrameno San Diego Santa Barbara we're all In a biodiversity hotspot And because of the fact that we have so much new urbanization that is likely going to continue to march in these larger cities One of the recent projections was that 855 species are directly impacted already with more than 30,000 likely to lose Critical habitat and the breakdown for this looks like reptiles are squarely in the uh-oh. We have a problem area So we do have a problem, right? And yet cities oftentimes maligned as that problem Potentially provide us a solution. Why because most of the species we care about are here And it just so happens that these are the places where we live where we love where we breathe where we work Why wouldn't we want to have a positive benefit and impact On the places where we do all of the things That essentially constitute our lives So then the question is how how did we get here, right? Many y'all probably are thinking, okay Things seem dire, but I oftentimes tell my students and my classes It's important to take a little bit of a history lesson to see how we got here So then that way when we look towards the past we help influence our present and our future at the same time Now one of the mechas of urban ecology and the ways in which people can live in harmony with nature Tends to be the city-state known as singapore for those of you that have not been to singapore before it is glorious You should definitely go it is beautiful because they see themselves not as a city with nature around them Or as a city that has little plots of nature But rather a city inside of nature that the city operates and functions because of nature And that's important because when you share that against the backdrop of just something as simple as creating colored lines You start to really gather how immense this problem is So these two figures are just artistic renditions of climate and biodiversity loss together From 1970 set to 2018 So here at the top is where it was cooler right around 1970 And it obviously is a lot warmer today Compare that with the amount of species we had around 1970 and how many we've lost With green being more species and obviously gray here being the loss of those species So we got here somehow and part of the reason that I show this to y'all is because Right around the 60s in the 70s is when we as a community not only of scientists and practitioners But also the general public started to understand our larger impact on global climate And that was the catalyst for us to really reintegrating ourselves back into the conversation because for some context Up until this period of time in the 60s in the 70s most ecologists thought that it was Not a good idea to be kind to do work and research inside of spaces where people were because Oftentimes people were seen as destructive and malignant to many of the species that existed in those areas And at the same time climate scientists were starting to gather some data And that data were showing alarming trends the trends being that every year year over year We would notice more and more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere And that that carbon dioxide coincided with human activity So the conclusion they came to was that there was literally no ecosystem on planet earth That wasn't either directly or indirectly touched by people That eventually led to UNESCO To create the man in biosphere program Right, so the united nations educational scientific and cultural organization Created this man in biosphere program which ran from the 70s in the 80s They try and start understanding how human activity is leading to many of the ecosystem consequences That climate scientists had predicted that then eventually led to the national science foundation Coming together and creating what's called long-term ecological research programs Which in 1998 established the first two urban Lter's one in phoenix, arizona Here and the other in baltimore and one recently in 2021 was funded in minneapolis Now it should be noted that there are hundreds of lter's that exist in the united states and there still are only three urban lter's Think about that for a second so Given all of that, right, we started to fully understand Our role in this system and I like to joke around with many of my students that global climate change essentially gave the biggest Alley you to urban ecology as a field So then that way we could start more intentionally and authentically thinking about the ways in which we are integrated in this system So that was the past right and we think all right Well, we've done as much as we possibly can to understand the past And yet we are going to turn this into a time traveling saga at this point You probably have realized i'm a huge marvel fan and I use this a lot In my lectures in order to get my students to be able to create these cognitive heuristics Right these bridges across what they know and what they're learning so in that way they could better understand it It trenches in their brain so for us we're going to use a little bit of a Avengers in-game reference here and do some time traveling again With the idea being that learning how the past Shapes the present is in fact the key to building a more just and biodiverse future And it should be noted that a concept like this has been in ecology already It's called legacy effects this idea that a species impact On an ecosystem can persist on that ecosystem even when that species is gone It's exerpated or the activity ceases all together So a good example of this is imagine agricultural fields, right? Imagine you are constantly tilling these fields over a few decades and then all of a sudden Agricultural activity completely stops It still would take anywhere from 50 to a few centuries right 50 years to a few centuries for that ecosystem and that biome to recover itself Now keeping that in mind Imagine if we were to take this exercise And take this theory of legacy effects and place it right back into the city And as y'all probably can imagine what the bay area looked like in the 1950s in the 60s It's not entirely the same today in 2023 So when we start interrogating these human historical legacies in cities Do we see any association between how urban heterogeneity how variable the city is It's somehow influencing how variable many of the species inside the city are And this is an important exercise because if we want to leverage cities as a conservation champion We necessarily need to understand What's influencing biodiversity in the first place in cities so then that way we can build solutions that help us Bring back many of the species that we lost Okay, now here's the exercise for y'all I'm gonna have all you be group here for a little bit right and the next set of slides I'm going to show you a side by side comparison of two different neighborhoods from each other So your task is to follow the trees and I'm going to have you point Either to your left or to your right when I ask you a series of questions, okay So y'all are group. I am group. We are group. Let's do this Okay So I'm going to describe these two neighborhoods for you This neighborhood right here on y'all's left This is of a township to the southwestern part of downtown Tacoma, Washington For those of you that have been to the pacific northwest and been to Tacoma You know kind of like how green this place is. It's called university place, right? The other Is southeastern Tacoma which coincidentally is just directly south of the downtown area of Tacoma. These two neighborhoods Are no more than a half mile apart from each other. They're extraordinarily close So if I were to ask you the question Which of these two neighborhoods would you expect to have higher vegetation cover? You would point to Almost unanimously everybody points to the photo on the left. Yes university place that one was easy. All right, cool second question If I then ask you Of these two neighborhoods, which would you expect to have a higher median household income? You would point to which one Yep, most of y'all still point to the left That intrinsic knowledge that you have that wisdom, right of somehow green space And canopy cover and vegetation cover also equal median household income it has a name It's called the luxury effect This idea that species richness or the number of species we're able to count in an area And biodiversity the relative weight of those species across different clades Are positively associated with wealth now We're going to dig into why that's not always the case here in a little bit But before we do I think it's important to note that this is not something that's hanging its hat on one or two studies In fact, there are multiple studies from plants to animals From those primary producers that create the energy to those tertiary consumers that consume Most of the energy like apex predators and everything in between wealth structures communities worldwide Here are some of the sightings, right some of the Manuscripts that have written about this and this is already outdated this year alone There were five to ten additional studies showing this luxury effect But what's really unique About the way that we have approached this is that these other studies oftentimes as many scientific studies do We'll take a look at one city See an effect or not see an effect and say there's nothing here or yes There's definitely something here and it seems really hard Especially for folks that aren't nearly as good at communicating the science to try and figure out. What does this all mean? well A group of us and when I say a group of us I specifically mean the urban wildlife information network this coalition of scientists and practitioners across Not only the nation but now the globe using very simple ecological tools these camera traps To monitor wildlife across our cities and compare all of the cities at the same time So rather than doing one by one by one in a piecemeal fashion Now we can compare all of the cities together and see if there are any global trends So we had this really simple question How does wealth and urbanization affect wildlife across cities? And in order to do this we set up these camera traps on these urban to rural gradients Here you see a few schematics for seattle washington chicago illinois and wilmington delaware collecting data from 2013 to 2019 In order to measure human footprint or urbanization. We essentially use what's called impervious surface As well as building densities and vegetation cover and combine all of those into a single metric Then in order to approximate income We use the cost of one of a one bedroom apartment and part of the reason we did that Was we wanted to be as inclusive as possible as you can imagine certain areas of a city don't have single family homes So how do you account for those areas? Well, if we take cost of a one bedroom apartment. We more or less approximate how expensive it is to live in certain parts of a city And Like I showed y'all earlier, right? We deal a lot in the cute and cuddly and the charismatic megafauna So I would be remiss if I didn't share any of the photos that we captured in the field Here are some from the pacific northwest and from the bay area We have a deer staring into the camera a group of raccoons. My personal favorite Is this one up here in the top right of these raccoons practicing their parkour Fantastic So what do we find? Well, this is a sort of a dull moment But it's worth saying that species richness or again the number of species unique species were able to count in an environment In relation to these income gradients varies across cities Okay, so what does that mean chris? Here is a figure from one of the papers we recently had published in 2021 With st. Louis being at the top and fort collins colorado being at the bottom Now if you are to the right of this dash line Like these cities are Then in fact, we are seeing this luxury effect meaning That the more species there are the more likely it is that the environment that that camera is in is wealthier But it's not the case for all cities, right? So you go from st. Louis down through to Tacoma and chicago and madison and here's the thing Once these blue shaded areas of the normal distribution curves start to overlap that dash line, right? Then you start to have a neutral effect or in some instances a negative effect if it's all the way on the other side Now it should be noted that this is approximating all species together So it's very possible that if we were to break this down certain species respond In certain ways relative to others Maybe for instance coyotes because coyotes are bougie are more likely to respond to the luxury effect But deer and rats could care less right Which means that we need to dig a little bit deeper wealth alone doesn't help us tell the story of the past So we have to better understand not only how socioeconomics work, but also how systems of oppression Work and how those systems then influence non-human organisms as well And perhaps one of the most profound and widespread examples of this systemic oppression Is redlining? So for those of y'all that have not heard of redlining Especially in the last few years here It feels like there's been coverage all over the map about it briefly It was the policy that was adopted and created by the home owners loan corporation And then sponsored by the u.s. government to create these color-coded maps Denoting who could live where? Based on the color of your skin So if you were black and brown you were relegated to what were called the c and d areas Essentially the yellow and the red shaded areas as you see here in the map for the east bay So these areas that you know right that you probably have driven through that you If you've spent a lot of time here in the bay area think west oakland think east oakland You see these spaces and you realize there has been chronic levels of disinvestment for decades That was designed that way on purpose This policy essentially Went on from 1930 to 1968 when it was abolished by the Voting Rights Act in 1968 The green and the blue respectively a and b areas were for wealthy white americans Now more than 230 u.s. Cities across the nation have redlining maps that look just like this And if you want to know more about the many cities that have these digitized maps You can go to the university richman's mapping inequality project that lays all of it out Just to give you an understanding of what this looks like Here are some of the cities that my lab has done work in recently to coma and seattle washington San francisco and oakland california all of which look very different but all have neighborhoods From these green to red areas So you now may be asking okay. Well residential segregation based off of race and really residential segregation at any form Is a moral injustice What does that mean for the wildlife species how on earth are they connected? Well, let's start building the puzzle First things first. There's greater air pollution in these red line areas Compared to the areas that are the green and the blue the a and the b respectively Notice the dates on the citations y'all notice the dates on those manuscripts these papers were published in 2020 and 2022 for reference Redlining was abolished in 1968 that was more than 50 years ago And we are still seeing the effects of it today on ecosystem functioning Not only Is air pollution distributed unevenly as a function of these hlc grades We also see that these areas that were redlined previously have greater urban heat island intensity Means that it's anywhere from three to ten degrees hotter in those areas Largely because many of those red line areas Do not have nearly as much urban tree canopy cover or vegetation cover And that's important because the trees As alorex would say give us life give us energy and they provide environmental cooling When they release oxygen and when they're taking up water, they also cool the environment around us They can't really do that if they're not there And many of the environments that were redlined essentially created streets that had absolutely no green space at all That concrete retains the heat so much so that we see greater intensification of many of these ecosystem hazards And all of that all of that together Influences where we see biodiversity So a recent paper by a colleague of mine, Diego Elizondo and company Created a map of all of the community science data So for instance, some of y'all may have heard of iNaturalist or eBur these community science platforms That allow us to work with members of the community to report what species are where We then can take and collate all of those observations and see where most of the species are and where most of the reports are And in almost every single city Those a and those b areas the green and the blue have greater biodiversity sampling Another paper coming out from one of my students says our estian is showing that the amount of biodiversity is also significantly reduced in these red line areas So not only are we not sampling in the areas. We in fact don't even have A appropriate amount of species there And remember what i told y'all at top i told y'all that biodiversity is our shield Right biodiversity helps us maintain our own health So what are we saying when certain folks in our urban communities don't have access to biodiversity in the other ways that some others do That is quintessentially an environmental justice issue Highlighting the fact that past societal legacies do indeed influence the present So if we ever have a hope of wanting to be able to conserve species We need to think about how we do that in cities. We need to be more unconventional We need to think about how society is integrated Into all of these practices and how we build a better more just environment not just for us But for the animals that we live with Like this coyote that's just trying to make it work that's doing a pretty good job And making it work and yet this is One of few examples where these animals are thriving We can do a whole lot more To build a system through the past present and future That helps us build that resilience Where our community is not just each other in this room But also the other non-human organisms we share this planet with And that's what helped us to develop a book Ironically about this entire talk that just was printed in the uk and should be out here later in december About urban biodiversity inequity and how we need to think of not only conservation in cities Which is our traditional approach about population genetics and making sure the animals are hardy enough to exist in changing environments But also conservation of cities conservation of the function of those cities and the ecosystem properties they're in Conservation for cities where we think about the ways in which we do this for our communities of practice We do this in service to the environments that we live in as well as conservation with cities And that one is the most crucial We cannot do this alone, right? I cannot I can do my part with the many fancy models and the camera traps that we have at our disposal But I only have a limited skill set one that is Necessarily situated in my own intersectional and positional identity And each of you have your own skills that you could bring to this table Which is part of the reason why you're here today is because I know you believe in that fact So with that, I'll just conclude to say thank you all for your time Thank you for coming to the talk and obviously go bears Thank you Hello, yes, uh, so we're just gonna kick off our um qna Session so if anyone has questions, please just raise your hands and I'll pass the microphone Yes first question Hi, um How does uh Creating biodiversity in cities conflict with building more housing That's a great question oftentimes many folks will and I'll repeat the question just for folks on the live stream The question was how does essentially bolstering biodiversity in cities potentially conflict with creating more housing So oftentimes the two are put against each other Where somehow if you have more habitat for more biodiversity species Then you are taking away many of the homes that could be for people But that sort of is a little bit of a misnomer and oftentimes when many folks that are Urban planners developers politicians tell us that I'm just letting y'all know right now. They're gaslighting us Right because there are many many many vacant homes and lots that currently sit right now That could be housing people In fact, the problem is not necessarily that biodiversity and housing are antithetical to each other But in fact that they actually can coexist with each other Really good example because we do a lot of work in urban systems and specifically here in the bay area I can tell you that we have Many encampments in almost every single park that we go to And many of those encampments have more and more and more folks that are unable to survive and live in the bay area Right. These are folks that are highly educated and still are unhoused in fact a good proportion of the folks that come to berkeley May themselves be unhoused So thinking about how we build more housing Actually is thinking about how we build more sustainable housing More housing that allows for many of those folks to be able to dwell In homes that are safe that are clean while at the same time allowing for that habitat space to exist And the amount of money we would actually save By being able to maintain homes for folks that are cost affordable Will then free up Enough habitat in green space for many of the wildlife that already exist in the city to be and stay in those cities So oftentimes we'll say well, we need to create more homes. That means we need to get rid of more habitat We actually need to do a better job of just using the habitat that we already have using the homes that we already have And creating policies and solutions that help us get there Versus saying well, we have to do one or the other Which is oftentimes a well if we Don't create housing that helps us get money. Then we are the ones who are going to lose money Which ultimately may mean we have to get out of a capitalist system that restricts our ability to do both For those of us who live in cities What are some practical ways that we can promote biodiversity aside from not feeding steak to the coyotes? What are some kind of everyday things we could do just in our own lives to help? Absolutely Yeah, so the question was what are some things you all can do to help kind of promote biodiversity In your systems as an individual and I love this question because this is the one where I get to give you guys some tangible Results from all of the empirical work we've been doing the biggest one and just as a show of hands. How many of y'all are pet owners? Okay, more than 50% So If you have a cat you have to keep your cat indoors I know you've heard that in the past, but I'll tell you all of the reasons why cats No fault of their own. They are the most efficient predators on the planet And that is per capita. They cost more than a billion dollars in damages To conservation efforts whether it be for native birds rodents herpes so on so on and so on not only that They carry diseases and not just diseases that can go to other wildlife species But diseases that go right back into you. Any all heard of toxoplasmosis? Yeah It is a parasite That goes up into your brain and controls you so much so that it won't make you want to love cats more They're done studies. Yes. This is crazy. There have been studies demonstrating that mice that are infected by toxoplasmosis They like getting closer to cats. So they get eaten by cats toxo is A thing so Keep your cat indoors if you have a dog and you're walking in a space that is a nice hiking area Keep your dog on a leash Right the dog in and of itself also can be a carrier of disease that hops over to wildlife Say you do all those things which if you're interested in what a catio is it's a cat patio, right? You just create those It's great for cats. I have a cat Um But also You can get involved in local organizations that are doing a good chunk of this work For instance, many of the indigenous groups that are here are working on doing indigenous plantings If you have a single family home and you have a garden plant more native Seeds right and those native seeds help native pollinators rebound oftentimes We think about honeybees as being the biggest thing we need to save But there really are a ton of other pollinators that are not honeybees That are native to here to california honeybees are not native to california Right that you can start bringing in those animals to create a more vibrant community And all that even being said just like conserving water Making sure that you are trying to do as much as you possibly can To to keep trash off of the trails little things like that go a long way But yes, keep your cat indoors Um You you have a very optimistic and hopeful attitude and I agree with you and everything makes sense, but For somebody who would say that our real issue is And this goes kind of the housing population So we can't really do much about The fact that our population is growing and eventually our our natural resources are Are going to be maxed out. So I'm wondering if you could Maybe address The perspective or the attitude that It's too late. We can do little things around the margins But unless we do something related to population growth We're going to have a really hard time creating a sustainable Community and we we already know that we're seeing mass extinctions in other places hotter drier areas, but Like as just as a practical matter on the ground What would you say to somebody who says we've just got too many people and it's too late? Yeah, that's a good question. So just to reiterate the question was, you know It feels like we sort of are already past a threshold where it's too much and the population is too great And we sort of are out of options, right? So what would I say to to folks like that? Well There are many threads and stick with me on this thread, right? The first being what oftentimes is this idea of overpopulation being the biggest threat and that Because we've already passed eight million We have no hope it should be noted That the numbers clearly state here that overpopulation is not the problem It has been deemed the problem for the last 20 to 50 years But in fact, it's actually over exploitation and not over exploitation by the many but by the few 1% right so the top 1% of earners in the globe Use more resources than the majority of most countries Think about that for a second, right the top 1% use more resources than the majority of most countries The problem is not that we have too many people on the planet. The problem is that the distribution of wealth and resources Is incredibly inequitable to the point that we are dying because of that societal and global inequity So that's number one number two and this is oftentimes me being the black panther and traveling back to the ancestral plane My ancestors were enslaved And many of them did not see the other side of enslavement They did not see the other side of not being in bondage and they fought anyway Right. I have many folks that are in my lab that are queer that are from immigrant families That have themselves had their own struggles and their parents and their grandparents and their great grandparents They fought because they knew and they understood that They may not reap the benefits that they're starting to sow But later generations will and i'm a dad. I have a five and a seven-year-old this hits home Really personally and I know that All of the work that I do It may not come to fruition. I may not be able to see us get on the other side of this hump But I want to make sure I prepare them as much as possible to continue that fight in a way that gives me hope Because there is no other option for those of y'all that are parents, you know, there is no other option You have to fight right whether it's through the pandemic or looming government shutdowns losing species There is no other option So for all of those reasons, right? I think it's important to be hopeful because If we all commit ourselves to actually saying no, we're gonna do this We're going to do it period Yeah, thank you so much for your last response. Um, I guess this is more of an objective question, but I'm just in terms of like data and like definitions When does a dwelling get considered an urban area or a city? And how do like nuances in these definitions affect your research? Yeah, so the question was how how does how do we I mean to boil it down. How is the city a city? How do we know what is a city and what isn't right and when does it transform? the short answer We still are trying to figure that out The long answer is that there are A set of quintessential categories that help us understand What is urban and what isn't and there is a gradient of what is urban and what isn't right? So one of the biggest ones being the amount of landscape that's been transformed Right, so we transform something That would have been soil that would have been potentially more fertile to impervious surfaces like buildings and roads and walkways There are also differences in the distribution of how many people Exist in an area So if there is a greater density of folks sometimes it's 5,000 sometimes it's 50,000 within a given area Then we start saying, okay. Well, this is an urban space And even then when we have all of those definitions Each city is different even here just in the bay area alone San Francisco And oakland are right there and they're so dramatically different And on the ground perspective The amount of poison oak you guys probably have noticed has increased A lot recently when we're going through and setting up these cameras We notice that there seems to be sometimes five to tenfold more poison oak In the east bay, but it's not like that in san francisco at all Because the micro climates are so different and the distribution of building densities is different that it shapes what's where So that's again the long way of me saying that there are certain properties. We look at how many people are in this space How big the green space is how complex that green space is and then what the row densities look like But even then we're still trying to figure that out I wonder if you'd like to comment at all on the effects of roadways and freeways on the decimation of wildlife and the use or misuse or non-use of overpasses and bridges and tunnels Yeah, so the question here is specifically about roads right and roadways and how they potentially constrict Or separate communities from each other and as y'all probably can imagine There is a whole subfield within urban ecology alone That looks at roadways and their impacts on animal movement on the amount of ecosystem disturbances that are created from noise And diesel particulate matter to restricting the population size and the effect of population size or essentially the genetics Of the species and some of the things that we know are kind of clear as day and repeated across studies across species That the more roads there are The bigger those roads are the harder it is for organisms to go from point a to point b habitat a to habitat b Especially the ones that can't fly and even the ones that can fly have a hard time doing so So it restricts the number of individuals that can get to either of those habitats And reduces the amount of genetic diversity And one of the things that we didn't talk about here in biodiversity Which I share oftentimes in my lectures is that we oftentimes think of the large macro organism as biodiversity But genetic diversity is also a level of biodiversity that we oftentimes don't always think about And biodiversity in cities gets constricted it gets reduced For almost all other species now it should be noted that there are some examples where certain species develop New genes they have new strategies and they're naturally selected or Nutrally selected for living in these urban spaces But yes, one of the ways in which we're hoping to combat that is either by transitioning roads from being these major huge roadways to being smaller roadways with walk paths or bike paths on either side And creating wildlife crossings. So in los angeles where i'm from the annenberg crossing was just created Over i think it was the 101 or the 405 one of those major highways In light of p 22 right the mountain lion who is extraordinarily famous for existing up in the hollywood hills So there was a huge amount of campaigning over 22 years by many of my colleagues to get that bridge started But it's not going to be built and finished until 2027 and we need a whole lot more of them Now granted the road conversation is connected to all of these other Inequity conversations We have a lot of roads because it's so expensive for people to live and work in the same spaces So folks have to live really really far away And then work back in the city which then requires more highways if folks were able to have employment opportunities That were much closer to where they live Everybody could bike Should also be a right right a human right like i would love to be able to bike And i'm a faculty member here at berkeley and i still got to drive my kids to school That tells you how expensive it is right so given that it it sort of comes down to a Michael jackson man in the mirror moment We sort of need to sit ourselves on the couch and say how do we start building better cities For everybody because and that's when we're going to be able to start saying like you know what if we build Greater public transportation make sure that the barc system is everywhere in richmond And all goes all the way down to san liandro and other places that serve all communities Then we start getting somewhere then we start building ourselves up enough to essentially put our mask on before we put the mask on of the child That is wildlife right put your mask on first as i tell you so i think the roads that's super important and Ironically roads are connected to all other things and if we build better connectivity with ourselves We can start building better connectivity within our environment We have time for one more question Bring it home. Uh, thank you so much. I just love the intersectionality of how how this is all connected and how you present it Um Also, if we live in la and want to give a shout out to tree people Which we've been involved with for a long time and I just think this work Yeah, and I guess we're suburban dwellers, right? And so I'd love for you just to talk a little bit about changing out from solid to impervious Groundcover right and and and how that can be sort of i've been interested in some of these books about Diversity of backyard, you know just gardens neighborhood gardens Yeah, so the question here being about how do we start how do we start transitioning our cities? From being something where it's just hard concrete and these impervious surfaces where nothing gets into More of these pervious surfaces these surfaces that breathe right and one fun fact for y'all that I often tell my students is that soil is way more important than we give it credit And this is me being the carnivore biologist saying soil is really important It is the third largest sink of all carbon on our planet So when we create these impervious surfaces it essentially seals The the surface where there is no exchange of carbon dioxide Meaning there are there's no possibility for the microorganisms the small invertebrates and everything else to live in those soils So there are many environmental engineers that are creating more permeable surfaces that can start to breathe And one good example that I know of when I visited with some of my colleagues in Chicago at Lincoln Park Zoo Are engineers that are transforming schoolyards to being these hard kind of like asphalt things that Really for those of y'all that have small kids, you know, they destroy shoes I'm like getting my kids shoes every other month because these hard tops are terrible But then they've transformed those systems to being more of these permeable surfaces That essentially let water come in through the permeable surface. It's really bouncy sort of like Um a play mat, but it allows for water to come in and then it builds the water table back up So then there's still some living soil underneath it and then they plant trees Throughout the schoolyard and then they have their own urban garden Right where the kids get a chance to learn about symbiosis and community relationships and how to grow things and water potential Right and food justice, which is extraordinary for k through 12 programs So things just as simple as you know, what what what would it look like if we started to reclaim our schools to make them be hubs of kind of like ecological unity And to that point one of the programs that was just launched I'm a part of called reimagining sf which has its hub at the cal academy of sciences is doing just that So through what's called their 49 squares program. They're thinking about every square of San Francisco to rebuild it back. So that way it serves essentially as a beacon for other cities in california So there are ways to do it and they may cost a lot up front, but then they're going to save us so much more into the future This was great. Thank you so much