Trees once described as ‘about as much use to our wildlife as concrete posts’ to gradually be phased out in favour of more drought-tolerant plants
The City of Sydney has said it will gradually phase out the use of plane trees across the streets of the city.
Plane trees, which account for almost 10% of the street and park trees across the whole City of Sydney but are the dominant species in some areas, have had their fair share of critics over the years.
Continue reading...Dutch study identifies several examples of corvids’ ‘amazing’ ability to adapt to the urban environment
Birds have never shied away from turning human rubbish into nesting materials, but even experts in the field have raised an eyebrow at the latest handiwork to emerge from urban crows and magpies.
Nests recovered from trees in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Antwerp in Belgium were found to be constructed almost entirely from strips of long metal spikes that are often attached to buildings to deter birds from setting up home on the structures.
Continue reading...Limited outside space needn‘t stop you growing an impressive display of flowers and edibles, installing water features or even having a stab at keeping bees
Continue reading...Around the world, architects, activists and communities are finding ways to bring wildlife into urban areas
Many readers have noticed wildflowers thriving in urban areas as city councils decide to let grass grow wild. These colourful little patches may seem like window dressing in the face of vast decline, but across the world people are welcoming wildlife into cities, where more than half of us live. Here is a look at 10 of the most exciting and innovative urban biodiversity projects popping up.
Continue reading...A family of wild boar were filmed walking on the Via Trionfale in the northern suburbs of Rome. In recent years wild boar have been wreaking havoc in Rome, even causing fatal car crashes. The animal is believed to be responsible for an average of 10,000 road accidents a year in the country.
Despite protests from locals and Green councillors, wildlife haven will become hard courts at cost of £266,000
A wildflower meadow containing 130 different flowering plants, dragonflies and rare bats that sprung up on Norwich’s last public grass tennis courts has been bulldozed.
Despite protests from local people and Green councillors, all-weather hard courts with floodlights and fencing are being installed in Heigham Park, where species including whiskered and brown long-eared bats, pygmy shrews, hedgehogs and 18 species of dragonfly have been recorded.
Continue reading...They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature
Visions of “lost cities” in the jungle have consumed western imaginations since Europeans first visited the tropics of Asia, Africa and the Americas. From the Lost City of Z to El Dorado, a thirst for finding ancient civilisations and their treasures in perilous tropical forest settings has driven innumerable ill-fated expeditions. This obsession has seeped into western societies’ popular ideas of tropical forest cities, with overgrown ruins acting as the backdrop for fear, discovery and life-threatening challenges in countless films, novels and video games.
Throughout these depictions runs the idea that all ancient cities and states in tropical forests were doomed to fail. That the most resilient occupants of tropical forests are small villages of poison dart-blowing hunter-gatherers. And that vicious vines and towering trees – or, in the case of The Jungle Book, a boisterous army of monkeys – will inevitably claw any significant human achievement back into the suffocating green whence it came. This idea has been boosted by books and films that focus on the collapse of particularly enigmatic societies such as the Classic Maya. The decaying stone walls, the empty grand structures and the deserted streets of these tropical urban leftovers act as a tragic warning that our own way of life is not as secure as we would like to assume.
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