Towards an Everyday Nature Index for biodiversity in urban streets

Abstract

Vegetation in contemporary urban streetscapes is generally limited to street trees and grassy verges, with limited understorey, species diversity, or habitat value. The increasing recognition that human-nature interactions offer substantial benefits to urban residents demands new ways of planning and designing urban streetscapes. To drive this change, new measures of success are required that quantify the fundamental resources needed to support more complex ecosystems. This requires a significant step beyond existing canopy-focused ‘urban forestry’ metrics. Here we propose a metric that can quantify streetscape support for biodiversity as a composite index, incorporating measures of vegetati..