The Role of Urban Green Space in Biodiversity Conservation

As urban environments continue to grow and spread across the landscape, natural spaces disappear, along with the services they provide to people and wildlife. In order to mitigate this loss, certain spaces within urban areas are “greenified” with the addition of parks, gardens, trees, lakes, and bioswales. While these additions seem to be excellent additions, do they truly make up for the loss of benefits the land offered before it was converted?
Green spaces have many benefits from increasing tourism to growing food. Not only do green spaces impact our mental and physical health, but they also encourage positive social interaction in communities. There isn’t much debate as to whether green spaces in urban environments benefit humans. There is, however, questions as to how beneficial these spaces are to wildlife and biodiversity as a whole.

Recent studies have examined how well parks, gardens, and other urban green spaces support biodiversity, and the results show that not all green spaces are created equally. According to an article published in 2017 by Caragh Threlfall and their colleagues in the Journal of Applied Ecology, green spaces that included understory vegetation saw higher diversity rates in bats, insects, and birds. The study also found that the addition of native flora throughout the space also had a positive impact on diversity. Interestingly, increasing the density of mature, native trees did not strongly impact diversity. Unfortunately, installing and maintaining a forest understory in parks and other green spaces can limit what human activities can occur in that area, which highlights one of the biggest challenges in designing an urban green space: multiple goals that may at times conflict with each other.
Overall, it can be said that urban green spaces do have the potential to benefit biodiversity, but only if they are carefully designed with biodiversity in mind.

Here’s a link to the cited article by Threlfall et al.: Increasing biodiversity in urban green spaces through simple vegetation interventions - Threlfall - 2017 - Journal of Applied Ecology - Wiley Online Library

by Amy Keigher, Natural Resources Agent, 2025