Online lecture: How can planners and urban designers best promote biodiversity at the urban scale?

About the event

Cities have the potential to play a significant role in meeting national conservation and biodiversity goals. However, there is a growing understanding that just quantifying the total area of green spaces in cities is not sufficient - connectiveness between sites of biodiversity is equally important. The built environment and transport infrastructure can act as barriers to this connectivity without us being fully aware.

To understand how to better “connect up urban nature’ there is a need to develop more refined tools to identify the optimal connectiveness, size and structural heterogeneity of urban sites to enhance biodiversity.

One such model has been developed by Oskar Kindvall and his colleagues from Chalmers University for the city of Gothenburg in Sweden.

In this free online lecture and panel discussion, we will learn how city leaders, planners, transport officials, ecologists, environmental managers, and property developers can learn from this new approach, which is also about to be applied here in Oxford.

This is a joint lecture between the Sustainable Urban Development Programme and the Ecological Survey Techniques Programme. Join us for what promises to be a lively discussion!

Image credit: Tiffany Yiu. Winner of the Nature in the City category of the Sustainable Urban Development annual photo competition, 2023.

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Details

Date: Tuesday 10 March 2026, 18:15 GMT

Location: Zoom

About our speakers

Dr Joanna Bagniewska

Joanna is a Departmental Lecturer in Environmental Science and the Co-Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Ecological Survey Techniques; she is also a Departmental Lecturer in the Graduate School. Her interests centre on zoology, teaching and science communication, and her career encompasses all three. Joanna’s expertise lies in behavioural ecology and biodiversity conservation. She has a soft spot for mammals, having worked on the American mink during her doctorate (as well as jackals, foxes, wombats and mole-rats before that) – though she does take an interest in other taxonomic groups. 

Dr Francesca Froy

Francesca is a Departmental Lecturer for the MSc in Sustainable Urban Development. Francesca’s research and teaching has three main strands. Firstly, she focuses on urban morphology and the spatial organisation of cities. Secondly, she explores evolutionary economic geography and the factors influencing economic diversification and economic complexity in cities. Within this field she has become increasingly focused on sustainable or regenerative economies and the green transition. Thirdly she analyses local governance and the ways in which local policy makers work together to govern economic and spatial complexity in cities.

Dr Thomas Hesselberg

Thomas is Joint Head of Programmes (STEM and Joint Programmes) and Co-Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Ecological Survey Techniques, on which he also teaches the data analysis for ecologists module.  Thomas' research focuses on how behaviour in invertebrates, primarily orb spiders and their webs, is shaped by internal physiological and external environmental factors. In particular, he is interested in how behaviour in general and behavioural plasticity in particular has evolved to cope with the constraints imposed by a relatively limited brain capacity and and in response to ecological and environmental factors. 

Dr Oskar Kindvall

Oskar is an Associate Professor in Ecology with focus on population dynamics, animal dispersal and landscape modelling. He is currently mainly working as a senior environmental consultant at Calluna AB within the domains of ecology, species conservation, risk assessments, sustainable urban development and planning of new transport infrastructure. Oskar is also working part time as guest researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. Beside his theoretical skills on ecological modelling, Oskar has long-term field experience working with various organism groups including insects (especially butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers and bush-crickets), amphibians and reptiles but also mammals such as bats and the hazel dormouse.