More than half of the global population is living in cities. The need for resilient and healthy ecosystems, fostering biodiversity and maintaining human wellbeing is particularly pressing in urban contexts where the highest population densities are coinciding with highest environmental impacts. Urban Green-Blue Infrastructures (U-GBI), ranging from technical solutions with an ecological component to entirely nature-based solutions, are hypothesised to increase ecological connectivity and quality, improve biodiversity and functioning, deliver multiple ecosystem services and direct improvements of human wellbeing.

UrbanGaia will contribute to the socio-ecological knowledge base on critical features of U-GBIs, and provide tools for guiding their establishment, management and evaluation. Applying an innovative two-way approach of smartphone supported citizen science including spatial data mobilisation on the one hand, and on the other the transdisciplinary valuation and co-creation of U-GBIs by a range of stakeholders, UrbanGaia intends to go beyond the state of the art and provide new insights on effective U-GBI implementation.