The study, led by Tesfaye Abdeta and Yared Girma of Adama Science and Technology University together with Daniel Lirebo of Ethiopian Civil Service University, set out to fill a stubborn evidence gap. While large capitals such as Addis Ababa have attracted considerable research attention, secondary cities — the places absorbing much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s explosive urban growth — remain poorly documented. Bishoftu, a fast-expanding town in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, offered an ideal case: a settlement where pressure on green infrastructure is intensifying, yet where almost no empirical data existed on what residents actually understand about the ecosystem services around them.

Methodologically, the team took a mixed-methods approach. They surveyed 383 households selected through stratified random sampling, ensuring that respondents were drawn proportionally from different parts of the town rather than from a single convenient neighborhood. The questionnaire data were complemented by key informant interviews with local experts, and the results were analyzed using descriptive statistics, inferential tests, and thematic analysis of the qualitative material. The research protocol was reviewed by the Research Ethics Committee of Adama Science and Technology University, which granted a waiver of formal approval on the grounds that the study involved minimal risk and non-sensitive topics; informed verbal consent was obtained from all participants.

The headline finding is a striking hierarchy in environmental awareness. Respondents rated their awareness of different categories of ecosystem services on a scale, and cultural services — the recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits of green space — scored highest, with a mean of 3.85. Regulating services, such as climate moderation and air purification, came second at 3.28. Provisioning services, the tangible products like food and raw materials, followed at 2.9. Supporting services — the slow, foundational processes that underpin all the others — trailed far behind at just 1.5. In other words, people see the park bench but not the soil beneath it.

Drilling down to individual services sharpened the picture. Recreation scored 4.6 and aesthetic value 4.3, the two most recognized benefits of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu. At the opposite end of the spectrum, nutrient cycling registered a mean of just 1.2 and soil formation 1.4, making them the least understood services of all. The pattern repeated when residents were asked how important each category was to them: cultural services again topped the list at 3.8. Pairwise comparisons made the preference explicit — a strong majority of respondents favored cultural services over regulating services (82 percent), provisioning services (70 percent), and supporting services (85 percent).

That preference would be less concerning if the invisible services were thriving on their own, but residents reported the opposite. Most respondents perceived a decline in both the extent and the quality of urban green spaces in Bishoftu over the past decade. Alongside that physical shrinkage, they noted reductions in key regulating services: air quality improvement, flood regulation, and temperature moderation were all reported to have weakened. For a town expanding rapidly in a warming climate, the perceived erosion of cooling and flood-control functions is more than a statistical footnote — it is a warning that the benefits residents least notice may be the ones disappearing fastest.

The study also probed who is more aware of ecosystem services, and the answers carry practical weight for planners. Regression analysis identified education as a significant predictor of awareness, with a standardized coefficient of 0.18 and a p-value of .001. Physical proximity mattered too: people living closer to green spaces were significantly more aware of what those spaces provide, with a coefficient of 0.14 and a p-value of .011. Notably, gender and home ownership showed no significant relationship with awareness. The implication is twofold — environmental knowledge in Bishoftu is unevenly distributed along educational lines, and it is shaped by everyday contact with nature, meaning that access to green space is not just an amenity issue but an information issue.

Why does awareness matter so much for a town’s trees? The authors point toward the politics of urban land. Green infrastructure in fast-growing cities competes directly with housing, roads, and commerce, and when the services a park provides are invisible to the public, the constituency for defending that park shrinks. A community that values a lakeside grove mainly as a picnic spot may offer little resistance when it is cleared for construction, unaware that the same grove was moderating local temperatures, buffering stormwater, and regenerating soil. Awareness gaps, in this sense, translate directly into vulnerability for the least visible ecosystem functions.

The Bishoftu findings echo a broader challenge across Sub-Saharan Africa, where secondary cities are expanding faster than planning systems can adapt. The researchers argue that closing the awareness gap requires participatory, multifunctional, and policy-driven approaches to green infrastructure management. Participatory planning would bring residents into decisions about green space before it is lost; multifunctional design would deliberately bundle visible cultural benefits with the regulating and supporting services that currently go unnoticed; and policy-driven management would embed ecosystem service protection in the formal planning instruments of fast-growing municipalities rather than leaving green space to survive by accident.

For a town like Bishoftu, the study offers a clear diagnosis and an actionable prescription. Residents already care deeply about the beauty and recreational value of their green spaces — that enthusiasm is an asset. The task now, the researchers suggest, is to build on that visible appreciation and make the hidden economy of urban nature equally legible: to teach, plan, and design so that nutrient cycling and soil formation become as real to a city’s residents as a shady afternoon in the park. As Ethiopia’s secondary cities continue to grow, the difference between green infrastructure that endures and green infrastructure that vanishes may depend on exactly that shift in perception.

Subject of Research: Community awareness and perception of ecosystem services provided by urban green infrastructure in a rapidly urbanizing Ethiopian secondary city

Article Title: Community awareness and perceived ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu, Ethiopia

Article References: Abdeta, T., Lirebo, D., & Girma, Y. (2026). Community awareness and perceived ecosystem services of urban green infrastructure in Bishoftu, Ethiopia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04906-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04906-y

Keywords: urban green infrastructure, ecosystem services, Bishoftu, Ethiopia, community awareness, urban ecology, cultural services, regulating services, participatory planning, secondary cities, Sub-Saharan Africa, environmental perception

The scale of local awareness is striking. When the researchers interviewed 394 residents across urban and peri-urban neighborhoods, every single respondent recognized the Indian house crow as a presence in their surroundings. Nearly three-quarters reported encountering the birds every single day, most often in residential areas where the crows scavenge around food waste and rubbish dumps. The average flock size reported by residents fell predominantly in the moderate range of six to fifteen birds, though many described flocks exceeding fifteen individuals. This near-universal recognition is not merely trivia about a common backyard bird; it reflects the crow’s profound integration into human-modified landscapes, where garbage, open food disposal, and ornamental trees such as Peltophorum pterocarpum provide ideal foraging and nesting opportunities.

Lizards, the study’s focal prey, are equally familiar to Dodoma’s residents. Almost 99 percent of respondents were aware of lizards in their vicinity, and more than half reported seeing them daily. Seven species were identified across the study, with the Kenyan rock agama (Agama linotus), the tree skink (Trachylepis planifrons), and the tropical house gecko (Hemidactylus mabouia) among the most commonly encountered. These reptiles are far more than background wildlife. Lizards regulate insect populations, serving as natural pest control in gardens and agricultural areas, and they in turn constitute an essential food source for birds of prey, snakes, and other higher trophic levels. Any pressure on lizard populations therefore risks cascading effects throughout the ecosystem, a concern that motivated the research team to quantify the crow’s predatory impact.

The community’s observations were unambiguous. Roughly 68 percent of respondents knew that Indian house crows prey on lizards, and 69 percent reported that lizard numbers in their area had declined, a perception they attributed largely to crow predation. Most witnesses reported observing predation events about once a year, though a quarter of respondents saw attacks weekly. Interestingly, these perceptions did not differ significantly between urban and peri-urban respondents, suggesting that the crow’s predatory reputation extends across the entire urban-rural gradient. The researchers also documented an economic dimension: previous work in Dodoma has shown that the crows inflict losses on poultry farmers by killing chicks and eggs, with predation peaking between April and August, and studies from Zanzibar have linked the species to the spread of pathogens affecting humans and livestock.

To move beyond perception, the team deployed a rigorous field protocol. They established four one-kilometer line transects in each of two study sites: Makulu Ward in the city center, representing the urban environment, and Ng’ong’ona Ward on the outskirts, representing the peri-urban zone. Along each transect, five sampling points were spaced 200 meters apart, and at each point, teams of five observers spent ten minutes searching for lizards within a 50-meter radius while simultaneously recording crow numbers, by sight or by call when visibility was poor. Each point was visited four times, generating 160 systematic observations conducted during daylight hours when Dodoma’s predominantly diurnal lizards are active basking and foraging. The researchers also logged human activities, distances to buildings, roads, rubbish dumps, and rock outcrops, capturing the habitat context in which these predator-prey interactions unfold.

The field results delivered a genuine surprise. Contrary to the expectation that heavy crow predation would suppress lizard populations, the urban site with the highest crow abundance also harbored the richest lizard community. Urban Shannon-Wiener diversity reached 1.51, compared with 1.12 in peri-urban areas, and evenness and Margalef species richness followed the same pattern. Crows themselves were far more abundant in the city center, averaging 9.5 birds per sampling point against just 2.3 in the peri-urban zone, a statistically significant difference. Across all samples, the team recorded 204 individual lizards, with Brook’s gecko (Hemidactylus brooki) dominating at 98 individuals, followed by substantial populations of the Kenyan rock agama and the tropical house gecko.

How can lizards thrive alongside their predator? The authors point to the ecological concept of the generalist advantage. Urban environments offer a mosaic of microhabitats, walls, rock piles, gardens, and varied thermal environments, that favor adaptable generalist species over habitat specialists. Greater food availability, diverse refuges, and the microclimatic heterogeneity created by buildings may allow urban lizard populations to sustain themselves despite elevated predation. This pattern echoes findings from around the world: studies in the United States have shown that reptile and amphibian diversity can correlate positively with habitat patch size and complexity in cities, even as long-term monitoring reveals gradual declines in common species. Yet the picture is not uniformly rosy. Research in Ghana on the West African rainbow lizard (Agama picticauda) found that urbanization narrows dietary niches and worsens body condition, a reminder that apparent abundance can mask subtle physiological costs.

The predation data complicate the story further. Urban areas experienced significantly higher predation rates on lizards, averaging around 12 percent more than peri-urban sites, even though the overall abundance of crows across the full dataset did not differ dramatically between zones in the community-reported comparisons. This suggests that the intensity of predator-prey interaction, rather than predator numbers alone, determines the ecological pressure on lizard populations. Dense crow concentrations in the city center, sustained by abundant food waste, may concentrate hunting effort precisely where lizards are most visible and active. The result is a paradoxical urban ecosystem in which both predator and prey flourish, but the balance between them is tilted by human-generated resources that would not exist in a natural landscape.

The study’s recommendations are pragmatic and community-centered. The authors call for targeted crow control in lizard-rich zones, including localized deterrents, controlled culling, and nest removal where predation pressure is highest. Equally important are habitat interventions: increasing ground cover, securing tree hollows, and, crucially, minimizing the open waste dumps that act as crow cafeterias. Waste management, the researchers emphasize, is not merely a sanitation issue but a biodiversity conservation tool. They also urge training local communities to monitor crow-lizard interactions, discouraging the deliberate feeding of crows, and engaging residents in citizen science reporting, an approach made feasible by the extraordinary baseline awareness the surveys documented. Strengthening local policies on invasive species, and incorporating traditional ecological knowledge into management plans, could align conservation goals with community livelihoods.

What emerges from Dodoma is a nuanced portrait of invasion ecology in the Anthropocene. The Indian house crow is neither a simple villain nor a harmless newcomer; it is a highly intelligent, adaptable opportunist whose fortunes are entangled with human waste, urban growth, and global trade. Its impacts ripple outward from lizards to poultry farms to public health, with documented losses to farmers and its role in spreading diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and salmonella reported in the wider region. Genetic studies suggest that invasive crow populations harbor high diversity from multiple introduction events, making them formidable adversaries for eradication programs. Yet the Dodoma study also shows that communities are watching, aware, and ready to participate in solutions. In a world where urbanization and biological invasions increasingly intersect, the fate of Dodoma’s lizards may depend less on the crows themselves than on how the city manages its waste, its habitats, and its relationship with the wild creatures sharing its streets.

Subject of Research: The impact of invasive Indian house crows on lizard abundance, diversity, and community perceptions in Dodoma, Tanzania

Article Title: Community awareness and the impact of invasive Indian house crows on lizard abundance and diversity in Dodoma, Tanzania

Article References: Ngongolo, K., Mmbando, G., & Abass, K. S. (2025). Community awareness and the impact of invasive Indian house crows on lizard abundance and diversity in Dodoma, Tanzania. Discover Ecology, 1(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44396-025-00003-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44396-025-00003-y

Keywords: invasive species, Indian house crow, Corvus splendens, lizard diversity, urban ecology, predation, Tanzania, Dodoma, community awareness, biodiversity conservation, waste management, Shannon-Wiener index