Cities across Australia have been trying to reverse the trend of urban sprawl by densifying. In Melbourne this is being enacted through the principle of the “20-minute neighbourhood.”1 The “middle belt” areas – those between 10 and 20 kilometres from the CBD – that are well serviced by public transport are the site of rapid and intense densification. Reservoir, the suburb where I live, is one of those development hotspots. Although the logic of increasing density in my suburb makes sense, what happens to the suburban ecology? And can small interventions make a meaningful ecological difference? First, two questions need to be posed: what organisms can be found in the suburban ecological matrix, and what ecological significance do they have?
Suburbs could be, Tim Low provides multiple examples of ecologically significant species that now live in urban, suburban and industrial zones, such as the green and golden bell frog () discovered in a flooded Homebush Bay quarry during the development of the site for the 2000 Olympics. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists these frogs as vulnerable, partially due to their susceptibility to the chytrid .2 The contaminated water of the quarry is hostile to the chytrid, enabling the frogs to thrive.
