Suitability of a metropolitan city for urban fauna: an integrated and multi-taxon approach

Urbanization is one of the greatest threats to biodiversity, whose conservation is a global priority. Several papers assessed urbanization’s impact on biodiversity by using different methods, such as species distribution models (SDMs), that can be implemented with data coming from various approaches such as field validation, or the assessment of biological interactions and physiological responses to environmental stressors. This project, using a multi-taxon approach (Arachnida: Araneae and Hymenoptera: Apoidea), aims to offer urban conservation management directives to the authorities of the metropolitan city of Milan through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary study. The project is threefold: 1. implementing and field-validating SDMs to evaluate the current suitability of the study area for the study taxa, 2. collecting data through an interdisciplinary approach (biological interactions and ecotoxicological data) to 3. asses if areas identified as suitable in step 1 contain hidden threats that might make them ecological traps. This last step will be done through a re-calibration of the SDMs elaborated in step 1 by incorporating data acquired in step 2, with also the possibility to model future scenarios. In the state of art, this is the first time where SDMs are validated with several types of field data, from ecological to ecotoxicological ones, to assess the habitat suitability of animals in an urban environment for conservationist and management purposes.