Abstract: Imagining our global future is an extraordinary challenge. Due to our escalating climate crisis, it is uncertain how recognizable our environmental landscape will be 100–150 years from the present. Inarguably, the increased frequencies of once-in-a-lifetime storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires already suggest that our current context is ominous. Building solutions that minimize impending catastrophe is therefore a particularly urgent endeavor, one that will undoubtedly require transdisciplinary, agile, and resilient tools that leverage collective forms of knowledge. The development of those tools will require all peoples’ experience and knowledge, emphasizing the need for environmental equity and access. Simultaneously, conserving species will be imperative components that maintain our ecosystem health and function. This work outlines how merging environmental equity and biodiversity conservation will be an essential formula for weathering the figurative and literal storms induced by climate change. In addition, it pinpoints key priorities and gaps in urban conservation research that may be critical components to ecological application and policy designed to fight future disasters. Further, it speculates on the contexts of future urban biodiversity management landscapes if eco-equitable conservation policies are centered at multiple scales of governance. In closing, it stresses that the future blueprint for eco-equitable conservation and climate mitigation has always been embedded in the environmental justice narratives of the past.

Contributory science—including citizen and community science—allows scientists to leverage participant-generated data while providing an opportunity for engaging with local community members. Data yielded by participant-generated biodiversity platforms allow professional scientists to answer ecological and evolutionary questions across both geographic and temporal scales, which is incredibly valuable for conservation efforts. The data reported to contributory biodiversity platforms, such as eBird and iNaturalist, can be driven by social and ecological variables, leading to biased data. Though empirical work has highlighted the biases in contributory data, little work has articulated how biases arise in contributory data and the societal consequences of these biases. We present a conceptual framework illustrating how social and ecological variables create bias in contributory science data. In this framework, we present four filters—participation, detectability, sampling and preference—that ultimately shape the type and location of contributory biodiversity data. We leverage this framework to examine data from the largest contributory science platforms—eBird and iNaturalist—in St. Louis, Missouri, the United States, and discuss the potential consequences of biased data. Lastly, we conclude by providing several recommendations for researchers and institutions to move towards a more inclusive field. With these recommendations, we provide opportunities to ameliorate biases in contributory data and an opportunity to practice equitable biodiversity conservation. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Cities are uniquely complex systems regulated by interactions and feedbacks between nature and human society. Characteristics of human society-including culture, economics, technology and politics-underlie social patterns and activity, creating a heterogeneous environment that can influence and be influenced by both ecological and evolutionary processes. Increasing research on urban ecology and evolutionary biology has coincided with growing interest in eco-evolutionary dynamics, which encompasses the interactions and reciprocal feedbacks between evolution and ecology. Research on both urban evolutionary biology and eco-evolutionary dynamics frequently focuses on contemporary evolution of species that have potentially substantial ecological-and even social-significance. Still, little work fully integrates urban evolutionary biology and eco-evolutionary dynamics, and rarely do researchers in either of these fields fully consider the role of human social patterns and processes. Because cities are fundamentally regulated by human activities, are inherently interconnected and are frequently undergoing social and economic transformation, they represent an opportunity for ecologists and evolutionary biologists to study urban "socio-eco-evolutionary dynamics." Through this new framework, we encourage researchers of urban ecology and evolution to fully integrate human social drivers and feedbacks to increase understanding and conservation of ecosystems, their functions and their contributions to people within and outside cities.