With increasing populations and climate change, cities today face numerous challenges, such as climate change, population growth, pandemics, which threaten their sustainable development. This asks for a fundamental revision of existing infrastructures and paradigms of city development, and the management of its green and blue resources. In this context, urban forests are vital, as they provide a wide range of ecosystem services (e.g. water purification, CO2 sequestration) and have the potential to re-shape and re-think our cities.
In the ReBio project, we will identify knowledge gaps and based on these we will develop a research agenda for future Biocities. The research agenda will be developed by considering urban forests from different perspectives (e.g. social, economic, ecologic). These perspectives will allow us to identify synergies, trade-offs and knowledge gaps within and between diverse aspects of Biocities, enabling us to develop an innovative Research Agenda that meets the current needs of cities and proposes solutions for existing challenges.