Steph Courtney Jones , Luke O'Loughlin, Danswell Starrs, Jacinta Humphrey, Stephanie Pulsford, Hugh Allan, Matthew Beitzel, Kym Birgan, Suzi Bond, Jenny Bounds, Deborah Bower, Renee Brawata, Ben Broadhurst, Emma Carlson, Simon Clulow, Saul Cunningham, Luke Dunn, Lisa Evans, Bruno Ferronato, Don Fletcher, Arthur Georges, Amy-Marie Gilpin, Mark Hall, Brian Hawkins, Anke Maria Hoefer, Brett Howland, Damian Lettoof, Mark Lintermans, Michelle Littlefair, Tanya Latty, Tyrone Lavery, Zohara Lucas, George Madani, Kim Maute, Richard Milner, Eric Nordberg, Thea O'Loughlin, Woo O'Reilly, Megan O'Shea, Laura Rayner, Euan G. Ritchie, Natasha Robinson, Stephen D Sarre, Manu Saunders, Benjamin Scheele, Julian Seddon, Rob Speirs, Ricky Spencer, Ingrid Stirnemann, David M Watson, Belinda Wilson, Peter Unmack, Yuying Zhao, Melissa Snape

Urban planning which enhances native biodiversity in and around cities is needed to address the impacts of urbanisation and conserve urban biodiversity. The “Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design” (BSUD) framework incorporates ecological knowledge into urban planning to achieve positive biodiversity outcomes through improved urban design and infrastructure development. BSUD includes principles to direct strategic design and placement of connected wildlife habitat. However, effective BSUD implementation requires defining and quantifying the landscape-scale habitat connectivity needs of a range of taxon groups within urban contexts. The aim of our study was to use expert elicitation to address these gaps in landscape-scale habitat connectivity currently limiting the capacity of urban planning. We estimated habitat connectivity needs for seven representative taxon groups in urban environments, including ideal habitat, habitat constraints, barriers to movement, and movement thresholds that determine habitat connectivity. In using expert elicitation to quantify habitat connectivity requirements for urban biodiversity, our study provides insights on both the usefulness of expert elicitation to inform urban habitat connectivity planning generally, and the functional habitat connectivity requirements of our focal taxon groups specifically. Overall, we consider our expert-derived estimates of connected habitat to be a highly useful set of baseline data for habitat and connectivity modelling and urban planning for a range of taxon groups.