Extreme climate events and territorial spatial transformations are accelerating biodiversity loss and degrading habitat quality, particularly in cities and their peri-urban areas. These landscapes present complex spatial patterns where land use fragmentation, disruption of ecological corridors, and altered hydro-thermal dynamics interact with heterogeneous human pressures. Global governance frameworks, such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), have explicitly recognized these challenges and called for biodiversity-inclusive urban planning to enhance the area, quality, and connectivity of green and blue spaces. Within this context, strengthening urban ecological resilience—that is, the capacity of urban ecosystems to absorb disturbances, reorganize, and maintain essential ecological functions and biological diversity—is increasingly viewed as a critical strategy for aligning urban development with biodiversity conservation. However, significant knowledge gaps remain about the causal mechanisms linking resilience processes to improved habitat quality and the maintenance of biological community structures under combined climatic and spatial pressures. In addition, little is known about how diverse disturbance regimes regulate these resilience–habitat–biodiversity relationships, leaving uncertainty about thresholds and response variability across contexts.

This Research Topic aims to elucidate and test the key mechanisms through which enhanced urban ecological resilience supports habitat quality and biological diversity amid extreme climate events and spatial transformation. We seek to clarify how disturbances of varying types, intensities, and frequencies interact with structural and functional components of urban ecology to shape resilience pathways and biodiversity outcomes. By integrating measurable resilience frameworks and explicit biological endpoints, we intend to build an evidence base that links ecological processes to spatial governance and actionable biodiversity management. Comparative studies across cities, climatic zones, and spatial configurations are encouraged to generate insights that are both context-specific and generalizable, helping to define principles for resilience-oriented, biodiversity-inclusive urban development.

This Research Topic will focus on how urban ecological resilience influences biological diversity and habitat quality under complex disturbance and transformation conditions, and how these processes can be effectively quantified and managed. Contributions should explicitly include a biological component, ensuring that biodiversity processes or community-level responses are incorporated in the analyses. We welcome research addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Mechanistic studies linking measurable indicators of urban ecological resilience to habitat quality and biodiversity outcomes.
• Assessments of nonlinear and threshold effects of extreme climatic disturbances on resilience and biological diversity.
• Analyses of how territorial spatial transformations (e.g., expansion, fragmentation, densification) affect ecological resilience and biodiversity persistence through altered resource patterns and habitat integrity.
• Integrated empirical or modeling approaches that reveal cross-city or cross-disturbance comparisons of resilience–biodiversity relationships.
• Translational studies that connect mechanistic ecological evidence to urban spatial governance and design strategies for biodiversity conservation.

Submissions are expected to provide quantifiable outcomes and mechanistic insights that strengthen the scientific and practical foundation for biodiversity-inclusive, resilience-oriented cities.

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Urban Ecological Resilience Mechanisms Under Extreme Climate Disturbances and Land Spatial Transformation: Implications for Habitat Quality and Biodiversity