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abstract：Residential landscapes with private gardens are major land covers in cities and their sustainable management is paramount for achieving a resilient urban future.Here we focus on the value of residential ecosystems for biopersity conservation and explore the social and ecological factors that influence wildlife-friendly garden management. Using a stratified sampling design across the UK city of Leeds, this interdisciplinary study develops and applies a mixed method approach, including questionnaires, interviews and ecological surveys across multiple spatial scales. We quantify wildlife-friendly gardening using two measures: (i) the number of wildlife-friendly features within gardens (the wildlife resources index, WRI); and (ii) the frequency of winter bird feeding. Wildlife-friendly gardening is influenced by a combination of garden characteristics and management intensity, householder demographics, wider environmental activity and landscape context.Residents reveal a range of motivations for wildlife-friendly gardening, notably personal well-being and a
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moral responsibility to nature. Respondents expressed a duty to maintain neighbourhood standards, revealing that social norms are a considerable barrier to uptake of wildlife-friendly activities, but also provide an opportunity where neighbour mimicry results in diffusion of wildlife-friendly practices. Community-driven initiatives that engage,educate and empower residents are better placed to encourage wildlife-friendly gardening than top-down financial incentives.19742
1. Introduction
In a context of increasing urbanisation (United Nations, 2010)and declining biopersity, there is concern that people living in cities are becoming disconnected from the natural world (Miller,2005; Turner et al., 2004), resulting in apathy towards wider conservation
objectives (Dunn et al., 2006). This disconnect from nature is particularly worrying in light of evidence that interactions with urban wildlife are important for human health and well-being(Fuller et al., 2007; Luck et al., 2011). Since private gardens are one of the primary settings for interactions with wildlife in cities, they offer great opportunity for personal engagement with the natural world (Dunnett and Qasim, 2000; Freeman et al., 2012; Power,2005).Private gardens are a major component of cities in both developed
and developing world countries (e.g. Gonzalez-Garcia and Sal,2008; Loram et al., 2007) and the manner in which householders manage these spaces has a substantial impact on the provision of urban biopersity. The benefits of activities by householders to encourage biopersity through wildlife-friendly gardening have been recognised by policymakers and conservation NGOs alike (Goddardet al., 2010b). Ecologists have recently attempted to quantify the extent of wildlife-friendly gardening across UK cities (e.g. Davies et al.,2009; Gaston et al., 2007) and found that feeding birds is the most popular activity carried out by an estimated 12.6 million (48%)households. Similar levels of bird feeding occur in both the United States and Australia (Jones and Reynolds, 2008; Lepczyk et al.,2012). Research suggests that supplementary feeding can benefit bird populations at multiple scales (Daniels and Kirkpatrick, 2006;Fuller et al., 2008),although others have highlighted the adverse impacts of bird feeding, such as disease transmission and increased predation pressure (Robb et al., 2008). In general, the cumulative actions of many householder activities can combine to benefit biopersity(Cooper et al.2007).Equally, these impacts can be negative,such as from the application of lawn chemicals (Robbins et al., 2001),predation by domestic cats (Sims et al., 2008), or the enhancement of biological invasions (Niinemets and Penuelas, 2008).
Residential landscapes are complex socio-ecological systems that are best understood within an interdisciplinary framework (Cook et al., 2011; Grove et al., 2006). Initial interdisciplinary studies have shown that patterns of urban biopersity are inherently linked with social stratification (Warren et al., 2010). For example, there is evidence of a ‘luxury effect’, whereby wealthier neighbourhoods support greater levels of vegetation cover or higher plant persity (e.g. Hope et al., 2003; Lubbe et al., 2010; Martin et al., 2004). Socio-economic status also correlates with the richness of various vertebrate taxa (Kinzig et al., 2005; Melles, 2005; Smallbone et al., 2011; Strohbach et al., 2009). At finer scales within neighbourhoods, householder landscaping decisions are influenced by the desire to conform to prevailing social or cultural norms (Kurz and Baudains, 2010; Marco et al., 2010; Nassauer et al., 2009). Research in Baltimore, US, has shown an ‘ecology of prestige’ whereby vegetation cover in private gardens is predicted by lifestyle behaviour and a need to show membership of a given lifestyle group (Grove et al., 2006; Troy et al., 2007). The presence of a shared social ideal often results in spatial autocorrelation of gardening practices in suburbia (Hunter and Brown, 2012; Warren et al., 2008; Zmyslony and Gagnon, 1998), although these findings are not universal (Kirkpatrick et al., 2009).