Publications

Erik Andersson, Timon McPhearson, Steward T. A. Pickett. 2024. From urban ecology to urban enquiry: How to build cumulative and context-sensitive understandings. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01959-5

This paper positions urban ecology as increasingly conversant with multiple perspectives and methods for understanding the functions and qualities of diverse cities and urban situations. Despite progress in the field, we need clear pathways for positioning, connecting and synthesising specific knowledge and to make it speak to more systemic questions about cities and the life within them. These pathways need to be able to make...

Niki Frantzeskaki, Steward T. A. Pickett, Erik Andersson. 2024. Shifts in urban ecology: From science to social project. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-024-02000-z

Carolin Seiferth, Maria Tengoe, Erik Andersson. 2024. Designing for collective action: a knowledge co-production process to address water governance challenges on the island of Öland, Sweden. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-024-01531-4

Enabling diverse actors to address interlinked sustainability issues is important and challenging. This paper focuses on how to design a dialogue-based knowledge co-production process to nurture collective action. Using the conceptualization of systems, target, and operational knowledge as the guiding framework, we designed and combined different complementary activities to invite actors to look at a wicked problem through mul...

Kejing Zhou, Fanhua Kong, Haiwei Yin, Georgia Destouni, Michael E. Meadows, Erik Andersson, Liding Chen, Bin Chen, Zhenya Li, Jie Su. 2024. Urban flood risk management needs nature-based solutions: a coupled social-ecological system perspective. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-024-00162-z

A growing number of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) has been advocated for urban flood risk management (FRM). However, whether NbS for FRM (NbS-FRM) achieves both social and ecological co-benefits remains largely unknown. We here propose and use a conceptual framework with a coupled social-ecological perspective to explore and identify such “win-win” potential in NbS-FRM. Through a scoping-review we find that ecological FRM measu...

Steward T. A. Pickett, Niki Frantzeskaki, Erik Andersson, Aliyu Salisu Barau, Daniel L. Childers, Fushcia-Ann Hoover, Ariel E. Lugo, Timon McPhearson, Harini Nagendra, Selina Schepers, Ayyoob Sharifi. 2024. Shifting forward: Urban ecology in perspective . Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-024-02007-6

The world has become urban; cities increasingly shape our worldviews, relation to other species, and the large-scale, long-term decisions we make. Cities are nature, but they need to align better with other ecosystems to avoid accelerating climate change and loss of biodiversity. We need a science to guide urban development across the diverse realities of global cities. This need can be met, in part, by shifts in urban ecol...

CC Chang, BB Lin, XQ Feng, Erik Andersson, J Gardner, T Astell-Burt. 2024. A lower connection to nature is related to lower mental health benefits from nature contact. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-56968-5

Increasing evidence demonstrates the psychological benefits of nature contact. However, the evidence is often established at the population level, and the individual differences in the psychological benefits gained from nature are considered negligible variations. In this study, we performed a cross-sectional online survey in Brisbane and Sydney, Australia, from April 15th and May 15th, 2021 around one year after the first cov...

Timon McPhearson, Erik Andersson, Filipa Grilo, Bianca Lopez, Nour Zein. 2023. Urban ecological resilience: ensuring urban ecosystems can provide nature-based solutions. Nature-Based Solutions for Cities. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800376762.00013

With climate change-driven extreme events increasing in frequency and inten- sity, cities are on the front lines of needs for innovative climate adaptation and resilience efforts (Dodman et al. 2022). Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly at the center of efforts to transform cities for climate adap- tation, improve the physical and mental health of residents, and contribute to sustainability, equity, and inclusiv...

Jakub Kronenberg, Edyta Laszkiewicz, Erik Andersson, Magdalena Biernacka. 2023. Popular but exclusive. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103774

Territorial conflicts related to the use of urban green spaces typically result from conflicting preferences and institutions not being able to account for the equitable distribution of benefits. Our study focuses on the value conflicts and contestations around using an urban green space as a "social good" and the political processes of defining what makes it "good." It investigates the institutional setting and the preference...

Brenda B. Lin, Erik Andersson. 2023. A Transdisciplinary Framework to Unlock the Potential Benefits of Green Spaces for Urban Communities Under Changing Contexts. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad009

New urban models increasingly seek to create more sustainable, livable, and healthier cities by reinvigorating green space. In this article, we highlight and briefly review several main but disconnected areas of study in which the factors that frame human-environment interactions and therefore also influence the potential well-being outcomes of those interactions are studied. We then use the intersection of affordance theory a...

Brenda B. Lin, Chia-chen Chang, Thomas Astell-Burt, Xiaoqi Feng, John Gardner, Erik Andersson. 2023. Nature experience from yards provide an important space for mental health during Covid-19. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-023-00094-0

Urban dwellers' use of public and private green spaces may have changed during the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic due to movement restriction. A survey was deployed in Brisbane and Sydney, Australia 1 year after the start of Covid-19 restrictions (April 2021) to explore relationships of mental health and wellbeing to different patterns of private yard versus public green space visitation. More frequent yard use during th...