Figure 4.

Cities provide habitat and increase population success for some species, with implications for regional biodiversity conservation. The positive contribution of cities can be grouped into five main pathways, each of which includes several factors that vary between urban and nonurban landscapes, depending on what land cover surrounds the city. For example, lower predator densities in cities compared with the surrounding landscape can release some species from predation in urban habitats, although this effect may be most pronounced in cities surrounded by wildland areas with large predator populations. Each cell shows the hypothesized importance of each factor in the city when the city is surrounded by either agricultural/plantation or wildland landscapes. Highly modified landscapes around cities can include intensive and extensive agriculture, or plantation forests.