Urban Appeal
Making space for birds
With most wildlife interest primarily focused on the countryside and special places, urban areas are a significant gap for the conservation sector in general. To understand urban areas, the birds that inhabit them and the impact humans have on them, we need stronger research.
Starlings recorded in gardens have fallen by 27% in just 26 years (1995-2021)
BBS charted a decline of 67% in the House Sparrow population in London (1995-2018)
Our growing human needs are posing a worrying potential threat to the birds in our wider countryside
Our unique datasets and skilled, committed volunteers give us unparalleled opportunities to provide evidence about the relationships between wildlife and features of the urban environment that would inform landscape planning, what we do in our gardens and park management.
With your help, we can analyse existing datasets and develop new surveys to understand the relationships between species and urban landscapes.
Garden Projects
It is impossible to quantify the importance of garden habitats for wildlife without having an accurate understanding of the resources they contain, and of how and why wildlife gardening practices vary across the UK.
With your support we intend to analyse and map the wildlife features in gardens, the reasons people have them and the impact they have on our birds. This will help make our gardens better for birds and improve the planning of future homes for wildlife.
Green Space Projects
Many towns and cities contain a patchwork of green habitats or greenspaces like parks, woodlands and gardens. How important these are to biodiversity isn’t well understood, but this knowledge would provide vital information for effective urban planning for wildlife.
Through investigating data about our urban birds and wildlife we hope to be able to provide guidance about the protection and management of these important natural patchwork habitats, for nature and for people.
“Today, we are more aware than ever of the benefits that wildlife provides to people, and that villages, towns and cities can be ecologically important habitats for many species. Meanwhile, we are at a critical point where plans for the expansion of our towns and cities to accommodate our growing human needs are posing a worrying new potential threat to the birds in our wider countryside.
All of this highlights the importance of ensuring that urban areas do as much as possible to support rich and abundant wildlife communities, before new developments are built and their effects are ‘locked in’ for decades.”
Help us make a difference
You can help us to increase the knowledge needed to ensure our urban areas benefit both wildlife and the people who live there.