Dorota Kotowska

Abstract Europe’s rural landscapes, shaped over millennia, support high biodiversity but often have lower living standards than urban areas, potentially leading to social and environmental injustice. Here we studied biodiversity and socioeconomic settings in Central and Eastern European villages across landscape complexity and urbanization gradients. We surveyed the biodiversity of villages by sampling nine taxonomic groups, including plants, arthropods and birds.

1 INTRODUCTION The phenomenon of biological invasions is a major fingerprint of the Anthropocene, contributing substantially to global human-induced environmental change and threatening both biodiversity and human welfare (IPBES, 2019; Kueffer, 2017; Pyšek et al., 2012).