Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design

Biodiversity focused design protocols in urban planning and develop

The cooling benefits of the greening of urban areas probably need little introduction and are widely known to help improve human physical and psychological health.

Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design (BSUD), is a protocol with the aim of transforming urban areas to have increased habitat and food resources for native species and ecological communities.

Biodiversity, or loss of biodiversity, has become an often-used descriptive term.

A shortening of biological diversity, it refers to the sum of genetic diversity in an area. With one measure being the species diversity, ie, the number of different species.

Speciation is the process of creating new species, and this leads to an increase in biodiversity.

Urban biodiversity generally refers to the remnant of plant and animal species left after the impact of developing a built environment, eg buildings, and roads.

By attempting to understand the changes caused by urbanization, and what was previously living in an area, from remnants, we can try and predict revegetation species and species density, and animal requirements to attract birds and animals from surrounding remnant habitats.

BSUD is a new approach to on-site biodiversity conservation and restoration in urban areas (Garrard et al., 2018), to encourage an increase in biodiversity, to be larger in area, including in much of the urban matrix, and together with help from engaged residents leading to an overall biodiversity increase.

The BSUD design can allow any trade-offs between socioeconomic targets and biodiversity increases to be documented and open.

In southern Australia, the use of locally-sourced seeds of local indigenous species, and protection of remnant vegetation has been more widely practiced since the 1980s. This attempt at putting back the biodiversity at best has been on a small to medium scale, and at worst tokenistic.

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