We are pleased to announce that APCG team has published a new paper titled “Urban Biodiversity Index for Trees: A Climate Adaptation Measure for Cities Based on Tree Inventories " in the esteemed journal: Environments.
In this groundbreaking paper, we investigate potential indicators that can highlight adaptation progress in cities under the current climate crisis. The suggested combined indicator, the Urban Biodiversity Indicator for Trees (UBI4T), computes the percentage of native, alien, invasive, and toxic tree species spatially throughout a city. It is developed from city tree inventories and evaluates a crucial aspect of urban biodiversity. The study presents significant findings, including the proposal of an easy-to-implement tool to deal with the twin climate change and biodiversity loss crises. UBI4T can provide important information to decision and policy makers, as well as city stakeholders, in order to carry out focused and successful strategic initiatives to preserve, enhance, and restore nature in the urban environment, thereby assisting in cities' adaptation and resilience to extreme weather events.
This publication, a fruitful product of our collaboration with the European Environment Agency (EEA) under the frame of a service level agreement with DG RTD, inaugurates a new era of APCG team incorporating biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and Nature based Solutions (NbS) into the group’s research activities. Over the last years, APCG team has comprehend the importance and embraced the research on landscape ecological processes to synergistically assess the complex and vulnerable contemporary environment.
You can access the full paper here.