Urban Focal Area Appeal

This appeal supported a range of projects which progressed our research into urban birds and the urban environment.

Please note that this appeal is now closed to donations. If you’d like to support our work, you can donate to a current appeal >

Why we launched the Urban Focal Area Appeal

Research into wildlife in urban areas is critical. Most people live in urban spaces, and so these areas represent one of the most common areas where people potentially encounter wildlife.

Urban spaces include gardens, where people are free to manage the area for wildlife as they see fit (and often do so), as well as public spaces managed by councils and other organisations, like parks and cemeteries. Urban spaces have historically not been considered by conservation research, making them an even more vital area of work.

Birds in Greenspaces

Birds in Greenspaces is an exciting new BTO survey which will be launched in 2026. It is a survey of parks and other green areas in urban landscapes which aims to:

Identify the importance of these places for national bird populations;
Provide up-to-date guidance, informed by the surveys, about how these areas can be managed to maximise their value for birds;
Enhance human engagement with nature through surveys, and through better management of greenspaces for people.

The Urban Focal Area Appeal fund was used to support initial scoping work for this project idea, with a view to providing leverage to secure full funding from elsewhere. Subsequently, legacy funding became available to support the project, which is now in progress.

The experience gap: actual and potential perception of urban bird communities

We know that wildlife encounters have positive effects on human health and well-being, and that urban areas (where most people live) support significant biodiversity. However, many people are unaware of the wildlife around them. Enhancing awareness of nature in urban spaces has real potential to improve human wellbeing, and in turn, to increase the support for conservation management in urban areas.

The first step in realising such potential is to understand how big the experience gap is, and how it varies across habitats within urban and suburban landscapes. We studied this as part of a major, collaborative research project that was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC): ‘Fragments, functions and flows - the scaling of biodiversity and ecosystem services in urban ecosystems’. The Urban Focal Area Appeal funding has been used, in combination with generous support from the Linder Foundation, to complete a scientific paper, with further publications to follow.

Species interactions in gardens

Species can affect one another in many different ways, including through resource competition, predation, and transmission of diseases. In all of these cases, data from Garden BirdWatch provide a unique opportunity to investigate the relationships between species.

However, there are challenges in doing this reliably; considering the importance of variations in bird counts, as opposed to presence/absence data, for example, or of how to consider records of species that are present consistently versus those that visit only fleetingly but might be disproportionately significant (such as Sparrowhawks). This research is currently ongoing.