Urban landscape conservation and the role of ecological greenways at local and metropolitan scales

Greenways are promoted for land conservation in both rural and urban areas, but less attention has been paid to the potential of greenways to serve urban biodiversity conservation goals. This paper presents results of a biodiversity planning study of a highly urbanized environment in Washington, DC (USA) that demonstrate the critical role of ecological greenways and parks in urban species conservation. The Cameron Run study raises fundamental questions about the way biodiversity is defined in urban areas, the scale of analysis required in heterogeneous urban environments, the role of sociocultural factors in urban biodiversity conservation, and the importance of regional greenway connections across the urban gradient. The Cameron Run study is a pilot project for an urban biodiversity information node (UrBIN) in the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program of the US Geological Survey (USGS). This paper draws connections between the rapidly expanding literature on biodiversity conservation and the smaller, but growing, body of research concerning the ecology of greenways and urban areas, and it does so through the lens of landscape planning. Findings on the Cameron Run watershed are reported, and biodiversity conservation in the watershed is discussed in the context of greenway efforts at local and metropolitan scales.