Urban ecosystems present both challenges and opportunities for wildlife conservation, requiring approaches that integrate ecological processes, human behavior, and innovative monitoring techniques. Once perceived as ecological wastelands, there is growing recognition that urban areas can support diverse wildlife species, particularly if people decide to conserve and manage urban green and blue spaces. To effectively support urban biodiversity, we need research that informs habitat conservation and human-wildlife coexistence.

This Special Issue highlights the breadth of research by members of the Urban Wildlife Working Group, a working group of The Wildlife Society that seeks to increase awareness of urban wildlife management issues to promote urban wildlife conservation and mitigate human-wildlife conflict in urban settings. Established in 1999, the Urban Wildlife Working Group supports researchers and practitioners focused on urban wildlife through professional development, The Wildlife Society events, and by hosting the International Urban Wildlife Conference.

The papers in this special section reflect the breadth of contemporary urban wildlife research, spanning wildlife ecology, wildlife physiology, and human-wildlife interactions. These papers also examine the ecology of urban wildlife across scales, ranging from the diets of individual animals, population level changes in behavior, to community-level changes in diversity. A consistent theme throughout this Special Issue is new approaches to monitoring urban wildlife. Urban wildlife conservation increasingly depends on innovative monitoring systems that leverage existing surveillance programs, community participation, and emerging analytical tools. This theme is particularly timely because monitoring is a major challenge in cities. The prominence of private property makes it challenging to establish long-term field sites, and the high densities of people can make field work challenging (e.g. theft, vandalism, privacy concerns) while also presenting new opportunities for data collection through citizen/community science and public reporting programs.

Future urban wildlife research will increasingly integrate ecological and social data to understand how wildlife respond to urbanization and how human activities shape those responses. Community science can expand the spatial and temporal scope of monitoring while engaging the public directly in urban wildlife research and conservation, while existing management datasets offer opportunities to examine population dynamics and human-wildlife interactions at broader scales. Research can also inform the design of urban landscapes that support biodiversity, demonstrating that conservation opportunities persist within highly developed landscapes. These approaches point toward an urban wildlife science that connects ecological processes with human dimensions and informs effective conservation and management.

Collectively, the studies in this special section illustrate the maturation of urban wildlife conservation and highlight the Urban Wildlife Working Group’s opportunity to advance the field. By integrating ecological research, novel monitoring approaches, and human dimensions, these contributions advance our understanding of how wildlife persists within increasingly urbanized landscapes and provide insights for fostering coexistence between people and wildlife in the cities of the future.