Effective planning for biodiversity in cities and towns is increasingly important as urban areas and their human populations grow, both to achieve conservation goals and because ecological communities support services on which humans depend. Landscape ecology provides important frameworks for understanding and conserving urban biodiversity both within cities and considering whole cities in their regional context, and has played an important role in the development of a substantial and expanding body of knowledge about urban landscapes and communities. Characteristics of the whole city including size, overall amount of green space, age and regional context are important considerations for understanding and planning for biotic assemblages at the scale of entire cities, but have received relatively little research attention. Studies of biodiversity within cities are more abundant and show that longstanding principles regarding how patch size, configuration and composition influence biodiversity apply to urban areas as they do in other habitats. However, the fine spatial scales at which urban areas are fragmented and the altered temporal dynamics compared to non-urban areas indicate a need to apply hierarchical multi-scalar landscape ecology models to urban environments. Transferring results from landscape-scale urban biodiversity research into planning remains challenging, not least because of the requirements for urban green space to provide multiple functions. An increasing array of tools is available to meet this challenge and increasingly requires ecologists to work with planners to address biodiversity challenges. Biodiversity conservation and enhancement is just one strand in urban planning, but is increasingly important in a rapidly urbanising world.

There are increasing calls to provide greenspace in urban areas, yet the ecological quality, as well as quantity, of greenspace is important. Short mown grassland designed for recreational use is the dominant form of urban greenspace in temperate regions but requires considerable maintenance and typically provides limited habitat value for most taxa. Alternatives are increasingly proposed, but the biodiversity potential of these is not well understood. In a replicated experiment across six public urban greenspaces, we used nine different perennial meadow plantings to quantify the relative roles of floristic diversity and height of sown meadows on the richness and composition of three taxonomic groups: plants, invertebrates, and soil microbes. We found that all meadow treatments were colonized by plant species not sown in the plots, suggesting that establishing sown meadows does not preclude further locally determined grassland development if management is appropriate. Colonizing species were rarer in taller and more diverse plots, indicating competition may limit invasion rates. Urban meadow treatments contained invertebrate and microbial communities that differed from mown grassland. Invertebrate taxa responded to changes in both height and richness of meadow vegetation, but most orders were more abundant where vegetation height was longer than mown grassland. Order richness also increased in longer vegetation and Coleoptera family richness increased with plant diversity in summer. Microbial community composition seems sensitive to plant species composition at the soil surface (0–10 cm), but in deeper soils (11–20 cm) community variation was most responsive to plant height, with bacteria and fungi responding differently. In addition to improving local residents’ site satisfaction, native perennial meadow plantings can produce biologically diverse grasslands that support richer and more abundant invertebrate communities, and restructured plant, invertebrate, and soil microbial communities compared with short mown grassland. Our results suggest that diversification of urban greenspace by planting urban meadows in place of some mown amenity grassland is likely to generate substantial biodiversity benefits, with a mosaic of meadow types likely to maximize such benefits.