Developing partnerships and growing community engagement in the study of urban nature

With the human population exceeding 7.6 billion and with the majority of people now living in urban areas, documenting and mitigating the impacts of urbanization are of global conservation concern.With expertise in education, outreach, and research, natural history museums are ideally suited to be core sites both for invigorating local communities in understanding, appreciating, and helping study urban nature as well as for building collaborative research networks that can help make urban areas more welcoming for wildlife and for people.At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA), we are creating a new interdisciplinary model for understanding and connecting to urban nature.These efforts include converting lawn and hardscape into a 1.4-hectare nature and teaching garden, installing a 600-square meter permanent exhibit on urban nature, and producing a field guide to encourage exploration and appreciation of urban nature.The collections housed within natural history museums provide an essential record of where species were found in the past.However, few modern-day records often exist in urban areas because standard methods for biodiversity surveys cannot be applied in areas with such high densities of private properties.Thus, in most urban areas, there is not enough modern data to assess how species are responding to urbanization.Building on community interest in urban nature, we are developing novel citizen science approaches to quickly generate urban biodiversity data.With the help of thousands of citizen scientist volunteers per year, we are generating hundreds of thousands of photo-vouchered species occurrence records on the iNaturalist platform as well as numerous specimens for the Museum's collections.University researchers and local conservation organizations are now partnering with Museum scientists to use these approaches and data to address urban ecology and landscape planning studies.