Woodlice in the city - landscape scale conservation in miniature

The latest issue of ZooKeys is a special edition: Isopods in a Changing World, containing papers from the 10th Symposium on the Biology of Terrestrial Isopods held in Budapest in 2017. The whole thing is well worth a look but three of the papers particularly captured my attention. Landscape scale conservation is a hot topic in ecology right now, however these papers look at the influence of small urban patches on isopod diversity and conservation.

Species compositions of terrestrial isopods in public parks of a commuter town in Japan https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.801.21875
This paper examines the isopods in 150 public parks in Munakata City in Japan. Eleven species of terrestrial isopods were present, of which seven were native or oriental species, and four exotic species originally distributed in the Mediterranean and European regions. The study showed that the urban public parks surrounded by forests or semi-natural environments provide habitats for native terrestrial isopods - native species tended to be located adjacent to natural environments adjacent to the parks, while their distributions had little relationship with the local environments within the park. The location of urban parks is an important factor to consider in their design to protect the largest number of species of native species - not something that usually gets much attention.

The role of urban forest patches in maintaining isopod diversity (Oniscidea) https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.801.22829
This paper assessed terrestrial isopod communities in degraded urban forest patches in a metropolitan area of Budapest, Hungary. The degree of urban disturbance was expressed using an urbanisation index based on built-up density and vegetation cover. Urbanisation indirectly affected the composition of isopod assemblages through the quantity of dead wood and soil plasticity. Urban forest patches harboured habitat generalist and established introduced species with relatively few rare endemic species. Areas with no or low anthropogenic disturbance had stable native species assemblages that were characteristic of rural sites in the same region. A bit of urban forest is definitely better than no forest, but not as valuable as an undisturbed environment.

Terrestrial isopods in urban environments: an overview https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.801.29580
In 2008 humans reached a major milestone: more than 50% of the global population now lives in cities (United Nation Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects 2011) - urbanization has become the major type of land use change in the 21st century. Terrestrial isopods are common members of the soil fauna in cities. They are well established in the built environment and in all types of urban green spaces including remnant habitat patches, parks, residential yards, vacant lots, and greenhouses. Urban isopod assemblages are a mixture of a few cosmopolitan species that thrive in human dominated landscapes, a subset of the native fauna, and more recently introduced species. This paper reviews studies of urban isopods, looks at current knowledge gaps and future research needs, and calls for a better global dataset, long term monitoring of urban populations.