UC Berkeley

Urbanization is driven by logics of oppression, leading to strong patterns of heterogeneity in thebiophysical landscape, including vegetation, environmental contaminants, and impervious cover. Thus, cities are strongly characterized by societal inequity and legacies of injustice. Yet, inequity-driven heterogeneity is seldomly interrogated as the origin point that potentially drives patterns of wildlife ecology. In this dissertation, I explore how historical injustices and societal inequity shape patterns of urban biodiversity and wildlife ecology. This research examines how inequity structures urban ecology across three focal areas: urban landscapes, community ecology, and organismal ecology. I begin by providing an overview of how the ecological features of cities are strongly structured by racialized policies and, thus, associated with social factors such as income and race. Chapter 1 combines satellite and environmental hazard data to demonstrate that California neighborhoods that were historically redlined (i.e. denied access to credit and financial services based on ethno-racial identity) have disproportionately higher levels of environmental hazards than non-redlined neighborhoods. Chapter 2 suggests that individuals in California’s reverse-redlined (i.e., greenlined) neighborhoods detect species with less sampling effort than those in redlined neighborhoods. This chapter also demonstrates that redlined neighborhoods in California are consistently less biodiverse across six major taxonomic clades and have altered species assemblages. In Chapter 3, I use data from the two largest contributory science platforms, eBird and iNaturalist, to ask about the ability to understand biodiversity by investigating if social factors underpin which census tracts have more reported species observations than expected based on human density and area in three US cities. I find that generally, census tracts with higher income, higher percentages of white people, and that were not previously redlined have more species observations than expected based on census tract size and population density. Lastly, in Chapter 4, I compare behavioral responses to novelty between coyotes and raccoons and investigate how urban heterogeneity affects carnivore risk-taking. I find that raccoons are bolder and more exploratory than coyotes and demonstrate that urban heterogeneity in human population density and pollution has differential effects on carnivore risk-taking. Specifically, I find that variation in coyote boldness is affected by human density, while coyote exploration is driven by both human density and pollution burden. In contrast, raccoon risk-taking was not affected by the included landscape variables but was instead mediated by coyote presence and activity. To conclude, I discuss the implications of this work for urban conservation and multispecies justice and call for a more holistic approach to urban wildlife ecology that centers justice perspectives.