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2017-2022 Patterns and drivers of urban biodiversity in Southern Asia and Western Europe

Urban ecologists are concentrated on understanding the general patterns and drivers of biodiversity across different urbanisation gradients for many decades. Accordingly, numerous studies have developed a basis in urban ecological understanding but mostly in cities of the developed regions in the Global North (North America, Europe and Australia). It is thus unclear if the existing knowledge from Global North can be extrapolated to other parts of the world, precisely in the Global South (Asia, Africa, South America), which significantly differs concerning its current rapid urbanisation. Marufa’s doctoral research works addressed this major knowledge gap in urban ecology. Her research aimed to evaluate if the existing concepts of patterns and drivers of biodiversity are consistent across urban areas of two geographic regions - Southern Asia (located in the Global South) and Western Europe (located in the Global North). She used birds as the study taxa in her research. Her first research objective was to explore the key driving factors of bird diversity patterns in South Asian cities addressing a major knowledge gap. Following this, her second objective was to understand if the driving factors of bird diversity patterns are similar across cities of Southern Asia and Western Europe. Lastly, her third objective was to investigate bird diversity and composition patterns concerning green infrastructure.

Her research works contributed to minimising the geographic research gap in urban ecology across continents, particularly in understanding the biodiversity patterns in the tropical South Asian urban centres of the Global South. As her research findings demonstrated, key drivers of species diversity patterns are broadly similar in many cases in the Global North and Global South. However, the intensity of the driving factors’ effect varies due to varying urbanisation contexts. Alongside, inequality in socioeconomic condition (namely poverty) mediate land cover change and might affect species diversity in South Asian megacities.

 

Executor Marufa Sultana

Supervision

Prof. Dr. Ilse Storch
Prof. Dr. Alexandra- Maria Klein
Time October 2017- January 2022
Partner
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