BIOVEINS - Environmental Ecoloy and Applied Microbiology (ENdEMIC)

Connectivity of green and blue infrastructures: living veins for biodiverse and healthy cities

BIOVEINS is an international collaboration, investigating urban green infrastructures (GIs) in urban areas. The latter are home to almost 80% of the population in developed countries, and are characterized by highly polluted air and a high proportion of impervious surfaces. Such surfaces negatively affect GIs by leading to fragmentation of urban GIs, the occurrence of urban heat island (UHI) effects etc. GIs however, have been shown to support native biodiversity, enhance ecosystem functions, provide important ecosystem services (ESs), and contribute to the human well-being.

In the BIOVEINS project, biodiversity, functional diversity, and ecosystem services (ESs) were integrated. The goal was (i) to use functional diversity to highlight the mechanisms underpinning the link between GIs, taxonomic diversity and ES provisioning, and (ii) to provide, together with local stakeholders, the ecological and interdisciplinary knowledge to identify the critical features of GIs, in order to guide its establishment, management and restoration and to mitigate the effects of major urban global challenges, like habitat fragmentation, air pollution, and urban heat island.

To accomplish this, parks (GIs) were selected in seven cities across Europe. Various taxonomic groups of plants and animals were investigated as indicators of GI quality and connectivity in providing multiple ESs in urban environments in each park.

One of the endpoints of the BIOVEINS project is to develop an ID-card for every park that was included in this project. These ID-cards will contain information on species biodiversity, the location, plant cover, ecosystem services etc. This way, the collected data from the analyzed taxa, regulating ESs, and indicators of GI functioning within the parks will nicely be summarized for each park in an accessible and easy-to-read report. All data is currently being processed, and the IDs are being developed. Once finished, they will be uploaded and accessible here.