Authors: Egerer, Monika;

Urban gardens are a form of green infrastructure that engender a range of ecosystem services, such as food production and recreation. These systems can also be biodiversity hotspots of animals and plants through a mix of annual and perennial vegetation and structural diversity and complexity. Yet, sometimes urban gardens are posed as ‘at odds’ with biodiversity if human aesthetic preferences and benefits are preferred over nature conservation objectives. In this talk, I discuss how community gardens are a form of urban green infrastructure that can reconcile conflicts between biodiversity conservation and human use. I present examples of how through management of diverse cultivated and wild plant communities in these systems, we can also thereby promote arthropod biodiversity, such as of wild bees. As urban community gardens are a form of urban green infrastructure that is consistently threatened and erased from our cityscapes, this work aims to prompt discussion around the value of these shared spaces for people and biodiversity.