Merin Chacko

1 INTRODUCTION Urban densification, such as in-fill development and urban consolidation, is an increasingly accepted sustainable development strategy to minimise the negative consequences of urban expansion and sprawl on biodiversity (Teller, 2021; UN-Habitat, 2015).

1 INTRODUCTION Urban areas, projected to accommodate up to 70% of the global population by 2050 (United Nations, 2022), are expanding rapidly, and the associated land-use changes are recognized as major drivers of biodiversity loss (Keck et al., 2025; Simkin et al., 2022). In response, international organizations have called for cities to take a more proactive role in biodiversity conservation (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2021; United Nations, 2022).

Abstract Understanding how species interact within ecological networks is essential for predicting the consequences of environmental change, from trophic cascades to broader changes in species distributions and ecosystem functioning across large spatial scales.