Ecological value dissonance in urban green infrastructure: expert perceptions and biodiversity patterns

Urban landscapes function as social–ecological systems in which ecological properties and human valuations interact to shape planning and design decisions. However, what counts as “ecologically valuable” in urban green infrastructure (UGI) remains contested and is often inferred from normative frameworks such as nativeness or naturalness, despite evidence that biodiversity in cities is heterogeneous and context-dependent. This study examines how UGI experts in Santiago de Chile attribute ecological value to designed and native-dominated landscapes and compares these assessments with empirical biodiversity patterns across plants, birds and butterflies along an urban–rural gradient. Expert perceptions were analysed through semi-structured interviews and qualitative thematic analysis, and compared with empirical multi-taxa biodiversity data derived from field surveys assessing several metrics. Results show that expert-attributed ecological value and measured biodiversity are related but non-equivalent. Experts consistently prioritised native-dominated landscapes, while empirical biodiversity patterns varied across taxa and metrics, without a consistent rural–urban trend. Urban plant diversity was high but largely driven by alien species, bird diversity was higher in rural areas, and butterfly patterns were more mixed. These findings show that ecological value in urban landscapes is multidimensional and cannot be inferred reliably from nativeness, naturalness or any single biodiversity indicator alone. Reliance on such proxies may constrain planning and design decisions by overlooking ecologically functional urban landscapes. Integrating expert knowledge with multi-taxa empirical evidence can therefore support more adaptive, context-sensitive and ecologically explicit approaches to UGI planning and management, particularly in rapidly changing cities of the Global South.