RESEARCH
Understanding Urban Biodiversity from Organisms to Ecosystems
Cities are complex ecosystems. Forests, wetlands, streams, meadows, shorelines, gardens, and built environments occur side by side, creating heterogeneous landscapes where organisms respond to environmental conditions, habitat fragmentation, disturbance, and human activity.
At Biodiversity Hub NYC, we study how biodiversity is organized, maintained, and changed within urban ecosystems. Our research spans multiple levels of ecological organization from individual organisms and species interactions to communities, landscapes, and ecosystem processes.
We combine field ecology and natural history with biodiversity monitoring, ecological networks, spatial analysis, quantitative methods, and theoretical modeling. Together, these approaches allow us to move beyond asking what species live in cities to investigate where organisms occur, how they are connected, why ecological patterns emerge, how those patterns change across spatial scales, and what they mean for conservation and restoration.
New York City provides a remarkable living laboratory for this research, but the ecological questions we explore extend far beyond the city.
OUR APPROACH
From Discovery to Application
Our research is organized around four interconnected approaches: discovering biodiversity, understanding ecological connections, explaining ecological patterns and processes, and applying ecological knowledge.
DISCOVER
Biodiversity & Natural History
What lives here?
Understanding ecosystems begins with knowing what lives in them.
We document species, communities, distributions, seasonal patterns, behaviors, and natural-history associations across urban habitats, with particular attention to organisms and ecological relationships that may be overlooked by conventional biodiversity monitoring.
Through field surveys, specimen-based research, environmental measurements, passive monitoring, photography, and community observations, we build baseline knowledge of urban biodiversity while generating new questions about how organisms live and persist in cities.
Biodiversity · Natural History · Monitoring · Field Ecology · Bioacoustics
CONNECT
Ecological Interactions & Networks
How is biodiversity connected?
Biodiversity is more than a collection of species. Organisms are connected to one another, to resources, to habitats, and to their environments through networks of ecological relationships.
We investigate these connections at multiple levels from interactions and associations among individual organisms to networks linking species with habitats and environmental conditions. Network approaches allow us to investigate how communities are organized, which species and habitats occupy important ecological positions, and how ecological relationships change across environments.
Because people are also part of urban ecosystems, we are interested in how ecological and human systems intersect through social–ecological networks, ecosystem services, environmental stewardship, and human relationships with urban nature.
Network Ecology · Community Ecology · Ecological Interactions · Species–Habitat Networks · Social–Ecological Networks
EXPLAIN
Spatial, Quantitative & Theoretical Ecology
Why do ecological patterns emerge?
Ecological patterns depend strongly on where and at what scale we observe them.
We use spatial analysis, quantitative ecology, ecological models, and simulations to investigate the processes underlying patterns observed in nature. Our research asks how habitat heterogeneity structures ecological communities, how biodiversity changes across spatial scales, and how species interactions and environmental conditions generate ecological patterns.
Natural history and ecological theory are complementary parts of this process. Field observations generate questions, quantitative approaches reveal patterns, and models allow us to explore the mechanisms capable of producing them.
Spatial Ecology · Scale · Quantitative Ecology · Modeling · Simulation · Ecological Theory
APPLY
Restoration & Urban Ecosystem Ecology
How can ecological knowledge improve urban ecosystems?
Understanding how ecological communities assemble and function can help improve conservation and restoration.
We investigate how processes such as environmental filtering, species interactions, functional traits, priority effects, coexistence, and habitat heterogeneity influence ecological communities and restoration outcomes.
Rather than viewing restoration success simply in terms of the number of species established, we are interested in whether restored habitats can develop diverse, interacting, resilient, and self-sustaining ecological communities.
By connecting fundamental ecological theory with applied questions, this work seeks to improve how biodiversity is restored, managed, and conserved in cities and other human-modified landscapes.
Restoration Ecology · Community Assembly · Ecological Engineering · Conservation · Ecosystem Function
QUESTIONS DRIVING OUR RESEARCH
Our field projects investigate particular organisms, habitats, and ecological relationships, but they also contribute to broader questions about how ecological communities are structured and why they change.
Two questions currently provide major themes connecting our field, quantitative, and theoretical research.
SPATIAL & COMMUNITY ECOLOGY
Urban Biodiversity Across Scales
How does the scale at which we observe nature change the ecological patterns we see?
Patterns of biodiversity can change substantially depending on the spatial scale at which they are measured.
We investigate how spatial grain, extent, habitat heterogeneity, connectivity, and habitat boundaries influence species richness, community composition, spatial structure, and species–habitat relationships in urban landscapes.
Our work combines biodiversity inventories with species–area relationships, spatial analysis, biodiversity scaling, and ecological networks to investigate how organisms respond to the structure and arrangement of urban habitats.
By examining multiple taxonomic groups including plants and terrestrial arthropods we can also ask whether different organisms perceive and respond to the same landscape at similar or fundamentally different spatial scales.
Ultimately, this research asks a deceptively simple question: How much of the ecological pattern we observe reflects nature itself, and how much depends on the scale at which we choose to observe it?
Spatial Scale · Habitat Heterogeneity · Species–Area Relationships · Species–Habitat Networks · Community Ecology
RESTORATION & COMMUNITY ECOLOGY
Ecological Theory as a Blueprint for Restoration
Can ecological theory help us restore communities rather than simply collections of species?
Restoration is not simply a matter of placing species back into a landscape. Ecological communities emerge through processes that determine which organisms arrive, establish, persist, coexist, and interact.
We explore how community assembly and network theory can help explain and potentially improve restoration outcomes. Particular areas of interest include environmental filtering, functional traits, species interactions, priority effects, coexistence, and habitat heterogeneity.
This perspective shifts the question from Which species should we plant or reintroduce? toward a broader question: What ecological processes allow a diverse biological community to assemble and persist?
The broader goal is to connect ecological theory with restoration practice and investigate when theory-informed approaches can help create diverse, resilient, functional, and self-sustaining ecosystems.
Restoration Ecology · Community Assembly · Functional Traits · Priority Effects · Coexistence · Ecological Theory
HOW WE WORK
From Natural-History Observations to Ecological Explanation
Our research moves between field observation, biodiversity documentation, quantitative analysis, ecological theory, and application.
OBSERVE
We begin by observing organisms in the environments where they live.
Field Ecology · Natural History · Photography · Behavioral Observations
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DOCUMENT
Standardized surveys and monitoring allow observations to become biodiversity records that can be compared across habitats, seasons, and years.
Biodiversity Inventories · Specimens · Passive Monitoring · Bioacoustics · Environmental Measurements
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CONNECT
We examine relationships among organisms, habitats, environmental conditions, and spatial locations.
Ecological Networks · Species–Habitat Associations · Community Ecology · Spatial Patterns
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ANALYZE
Spatial and quantitative approaches allow us to identify patterns that may not be apparent from individual observations.
Spatial Analysis · Biodiversity Scaling · Statistics · Network Analysis
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EXPLAIN
Models, simulations, and ecological theory allow us to investigate the processes capable of generating observed patterns.
Ecological Modeling · Simulation · Theory · Hypothesis Testing
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APPLY
Ecological understanding can then inform biodiversity monitoring, conservation, restoration, and management.
Conservation · Restoration · Monitoring · Urban Ecosystem Management
RESEARCH IN PRACTICE
Listening to Urban Biodiversity
Urban biodiversity can be observed in many ways including through sound.
Passive acoustic monitoring provides a non-invasive way to document biological activity across space and time. Recordings of birds, amphibians, insects, and other organisms can reveal patterns in species activity, phenology, habitat use, and responses to urban environments.
Bioacoustics therefore provides another window into the ecological communities inhabiting urban landscapes and complements field surveys and other approaches to biodiversity monitoring.
Spring Peeper (Pseudacris crucifer) Chorus
Van Cortlandt Park · New York City · 2022
RESEARCH IN THE FIELD
Urban Ecosystems as Living Laboratories
Fieldwork is central to Biodiversity Hub NYC's approach to understanding urban ecosystems.
Across New York City's green spaces, we conduct focused studies documenting species, natural-history observations, ecological associations, and variation among habitats. Our field research encompasses plants, terrestrial arthropods, pollinators, spiders, flies, aquatic organisms, and other components of urban biodiversity.
These studies contribute biodiversity records, observations, photographs, and specimens while allowing us to investigate broader questions about seasonality, habitat associations, community composition, ecological interactions, environmental heterogeneity, and spatial variation.
Our field projects are not separate from our broader research questions. Natural-history observations can reveal unexpected ecological patterns. Those patterns generate hypotheses. Spatial, network, and quantitative analyses allow us to characterize them, while ecological models and theory provide ways of investigating the mechanisms that might produce them.
In this way, our work connects careful observation of organisms with broader questions about how urban ecological communities are organized, why they change, and how they can be conserved.
Explore Our Research
Discover the individual studies putting these ideas into practice across New York City's urban ecosystems.
