Urbanization converts natural areas into built environments, and scientists are keenly investigating how this global human-induced activity affects biodiversity to propose actionable plans for amelioration purposes. Adewale Awoyemi, Head of IITA Forest Center, delivered a seminar on 19 October titled “Status of urban ecology in Africa: A systematic review”. The presentation was based on his PhD research supervised by Juan Diego Ibanez-Alamo of the University of Granada in Spain.
Awoyemi and Ibanez-Alamo conducted a rigorous literature search in Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar to determine what is known regarding African urban ecology in the last century (1920‒2020) and found only about 800 relevant peer-reviewed scientific papers.