Uptake and Engagement of Activities to Promote Native Species in Private Gardens

Activities undertaken by householders in their gardens have huge potential to enhance city-wide biodiversity, but programs aimed at activating householders require an understanding of the factors encouraging or acting as barriers to the uptake of different kinds of activities. We provided 42 householders with two species-enhancing activities, selected from six possibilities, free-of-charge (to remove the barrier of initial cost). We collected socio-demographic data as well as information on knowledge of common urban species, pro-environmental behaviors and nature connectedness. We monitored ongoing engagement at two time points: 1 and 6 months. Characteristics of householders opting for different activities varied in terms of their degree of environmental engagement, their knowledge about common species, and the size of their gardens; e.g., bird feeders and bee planters were popular with people who did not know the names of common species and were not particularly engaged in pro-environmental activities respectively, whereas lizard habitat creation was attractive to people who were already engaged in wildlife gardening activities. Cost to continue with activities was a significant barrier for some people, but most householders were willing to practice relatively inexpensive activities in small spaces. Esthetics was an important factor to be considered when enhancing invertebrate habitat (e.g., bug hotels are more attractive than log piles, and planters for bees contain colorful flowers). A commonly cited barrier was lack of information about wildlife-friendly activities, despite much being available online. Most participants (85%) talked about their activities with others, potentially acting as influencers and shifting social norms.

The ecology of human-nature interactions

The direct interactions between people and nature are critically important in many ways, with growing attention particularly on their impacts on human health and wellbeing (both positive and negative), on people's attitudes and behaviour towards nature, and on the benefits and hazards to wildlife. A growing evidence base is accelerating the understanding of different forms that these direct human-nature interactions take, novel analyses are revealing the importance of the opportunity and orientation of individual people as key drivers of these interactions, and methodological developments are increasingly making apparent their spatial, temporal and socio-economic dynamics. Here, we provide a roadmap of these advances and identify key, often interdisciplinary, research challenges that remain to be met. We identified several key challenges, including the need to characterize individual people's nature interactions through their life course, to determine in a comparable fashion how these interactions vary across much more diverse geographical, cultural and socio-economic contexts that have been explored to date, and to quantify how the relative contributions of people's opportunity and orientation vary in shaping their nature interactions. A robust research effort, guided by a focus on such unanswered questions, has the potential to yield high-impact insights into the fundamental nature of human-nature interactions and contribute to developing strategies for their appropriate management.

Human-attacks by an urban raptor are tied to human subsidies and religious practices

Growing urbanization is increasing human-wildlife interactions, including attacks towards humans by vertebrate predators, an aspect that has received extremely scarce investigation. Here, we examined the ecological, landscape and human factors that may promote human-aggression by raptorial Black kites Milvus migrans in the 16-millions inhabitants megacity of Delhi (India). Physical attacks depended on human activities such as unhygienic waste management, ritual-feeding of kites (mainly operated by Muslims), human density, and presence of a balcony near the nest, suggesting an association between aggression and frequent-close exposure to humans and derived food-rewards. Surprisingly, while more than 100,000 people could be at risk of attack in any given moment, attitudes by local inhabitants were strikingly sympathetic towards the birds, even by injured persons, likely as a result of religious empathy. These results highlight the importance of socio-cultural factors for urban biota and how these may radically differentiate the under-studied cities of developing countries from those of western nations, thus broadening our picture of human-wildlife interactions in urban environments. The rapid sprawling of urban and suburban areas with their associated food-subsidies is likely to increase proximity and exposure of large predators to humans, and vice versa, leading to heightened worldwide conflicts.

Personalised Ecology

The field of ecology has focused on understanding characteristics of natural systems in a manner as free as possible from biases of human observers. However, demand is growing for knowledge of human-nature interactions at the level of individual people. This is particularly driven by concerns around human health consequences due to changes in positive and negative interactions. This requires attention to the biased ways in which people encounter and experience other organisms. Here we define such a 'personalised ecology', and discuss its connections to other aspects of the field. We propose a framework of focal research topics, shaped by whether the unit of analysis is a single person, a single population, or multiple populations, and whether a human or nature perspective is foremost.