By Elise Mahon

Daijiang Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, has been granted a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build new tools that will help scientists understand, analyze, and forecast urban biodiversity.

Cities around the world continue to expand with more than half of the world’s people living in urban areas. This expansion will continue to alter biodiversity of these ecosystems and the valuable services they provide.

“We propose to first build a global database of urban biodiversity of over 1,400 major cities across the world,” Li says.

The open-access database will compile species observations from global repositories, community-science platforms, and structured surveys.

“With increasingly available community science-based datasets, now is a really good time to build the pipeline and assemble this information in a central database,” Li says. “Biodiversity provides lots of essential ecological services to us, so it’s really critical to understand the status of urban biodiversity and also try to forecast how things are going to change in the future.” 

The database will include observations of plants, birds, mammals, and amphibians around the world, as well as their functional traits, phylogenies, and environmental and socioeconomic variables. This data will allow Li and other researchers to ask questions about the variables driving biodiversity in cities.

“We’re also interested in climate change and land-use forecasting scenarios, to try to forecast how biodiversity is going to change in these major cities using advanced technology like generative AI,” Li says.

The project will also provide an opportunity for students in Li’s lab to grow their skills in working with large ecological and biological datasets.

Beyond campus, the program will partner with K-16 schools in Madison, Wisconsin by providing teachers with motion-activated trail cameras so their students can participate in collecting and analyzing real biodiversity data. For more advanced classrooms, Li and his team will provide Raspberry Pi-based computer kits, allowing students to program their own motion-activated camera to record observation data.

“Ultimately we want to make students aware of all the wildlife around us and all the amazing diversity around us, and get them interested in ecology or biology or even potentially technology and programming,” Li says. 

---

The Faculty Early Career Development Program offers NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. More information on Li’s award is available here: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2542703