Urban biodiversity monitoring: Practitioner‐informed criteria to support fit‐for‐purpose indicators across contrasting urban contexts

Urban biodiversity remains one of the most persistent blind spots in global monitoring frameworks. Despite over four decades of efforts to advance biodiversity indicators, existing frameworks still struggle to define meaningful metrics for cities, especially those that enable comparison, policy alignment, and mutual learning across diverse urban contexts. This gap is especially evident in efforts to implement the Kunming‐Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM‐GBF), where municipalities, researchers, and practitioners continue to face difficulties in identifying appropriate indicators for its urban‐focused Target 12. Addressing this gap requires a deeper understanding of how urban practitioners navigate the science‐policy interface when translating global ambitions into actionable, context‐sensitive measures. This study investigates how urban biodiversity practitioners approach the selection and implementation of indicators under science‐policy constraints. We draw on experiences from Kigali, Rwanda, and Melbourne, Australia—two cities that reflect contrasting urban realities in the Global South and North. From these complementary perspectives, we identify five practitioner‐informed criteria to support the development of fit‐for‐purpose urban biodiversity indicators. Rather than presenting these criteria as a universal framework, we position them as a screening approach. They are intended to help identify indicators that are more likely to be locally meaningful, operationally workable, and relevant across policy scales in cities with urban biodiversity monitoring contexts similar to those examined in Kigali and Melbourne.