Abstract

People often think that endangered plants and animals are tucked away in a protected park somewhere in the wilderness. Yet, we know that many species, threatened with extinction, live much closer to us – in our own neighborhoods. We began our research to find out exactly how much threatened wildlife lives in Australian cities. We overlapped maps of species habitats with maps of urban areas and discovered that half of the threatened animals and a quarter of the threatened plants live in cities! If we care about giving them a chance to survive, we need to learn to share our space with them.