Urban Ecology has evolved over the last century and flourished in the last five decades as a branch of Urban Planning. Urban ecologists work together with other experts from other disciplines in a comprehensive framework in which socioeconomic and biophysical components interact in an evolutionary process. They mainly focus on how urban/natural ecosystems and their patterns and processes interact in a continuous cycle. The more we understand this cycle the more we will be able to draw policies and implement a variety of projects aiming to promote biodiversity and protect wildlife habitat to satisfy the main goal of having a harmonic relation between nature and urban environments.

In my presentation, I will present the results of three research projects that I have been working on in the last three years. These research projects present examples of urban ecology research and how we, as Palestinians, can benefit from the findings to reach a harmonic relation between built and natural environments.

The first is from Palestinian context and focusing on how COVID-19 changed human-nature interactions across greenspace types including: (1) home gardens, (2) urban parks and green spaces, and (3) open natural areas. The research presents evidence of the change from the West Bank—Palestine in multiple types of passive, interactive, and extractive activities.

The second research presents another aspect of urban ecology research. The research investigates the signature of carbon emission across three spatial scales including cell scale (100mx100m), city scale and metropolitan scale. The research presents evidence of variation from 100 US cities that were selected to cover all ecological and socio-economic regions in the continent U.S.

The third research is a theoretical one that discusses urban ecology methodologies. The research explores different aspects of sample design in urban ecology design from 1960s to 2020s. the research presents evidence on the factors that affect generalizability in urban ecology research including: study sample selection (e.g., specific organisms, soils, or water), sample specification (measurement of specific variable of interest), and site selection.

The presentation will be concluded by discussing the opportunities and challenges of adopting the urban ecology approach in Palestine and suggests a list of corresponding recommendations.

Conference Title

Second Global Conference on Biodiversity and Human Diversity: Towards living in harmony with nature

Conference Country

Palestine

Conference Date

Oct. 19, 2022 - Oct. 20, 2022

Conference Sponsor

Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability – Bethlehem University in partnership with the Palestinian Quality

Additional Info

Conference Website