Vol.:(0123456789) Current Landscape Ecology Reports https://doi.org/10.1007/s40823-024-00097-2 REVIEW Functional Urban Wetlands in Dysfunctional Cities Leonardo Ariel Datri 1  · Micaela Lopez 1,2  · Stefanie Buchter 1  · Eliana Miranda Pazcel 1  · Marcelo Gandini 3 Accepted: 7 March 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Abstract Purpose of Review This paper reviews the theoretical background of urban wetlands through existing scientific literature studies, emphasizing Argentina. Questions were elaborated to contribute knowledge from a landscape ecology perspective, providing a more functional view and allowing a better assessment of the need to plan and include wetlands in the processes of conservation and connectivity at basin scales, simultaneously with the socio-ecological and biocultural contexts in which they develop. We also construct an operational concept of urban wetlands with approaches that value pond systems for their contribution to the dynamics of the global system. Recent Findings Urban wetlands play a fundamental role in urban areas as they contribute to their inhabitants by providing numerous ecosystem services. However, they are only sometimes valued as such from conservationist perspectives and by urban planners. Current urbanization processes produce changes in hydrological functions, water pollution, loss of habitat and biodiversity, and invasions of exotic species, as well as in the urban and rural biocultural heritage. Summary The complexity of the urban wetlands landscape requires new approaches based on adaptability and resilience. From the Ramsar Convention to the present, wetland science has improved our ability to understand the value of ecological functions based on data and new operational concepts. The scientific literature in this regard still needs to be more extensive. The integration of landscape ecology in understanding the processes that regulate urban wetlands provides a function-based approach and a scale of analysis that will allow greater detail of the functional value of their diversities. Keywords Urban wetlands · Functional diversity · Socio-ecological systems Introduction More than half a century after the 1971 Ramsar Convention, the wetland concept evolved to more specific definitions and new designations depending on the level of modification [1, 2]. In urban and rural areas, wetlands contribute to improved living and production conditions through water cycling and filtering, carbon sequestration, maintenance of biodiversity, and reduction of urban heat island effects. Regarding health and rights, wetlands favor more significant contact between people and nature and access to recreation. In this regard, the concept of wetland proposed in the Ramsar Convention is broad and generic. However, the specificity of wetlands’ ecological functions and dynamics in anthropized contexts is recognized today through scientific research and new per- spectives [1–8]. Although scattered, scientific literature has identified several categories of wetlands, depending not only on the ecohydrological paradigm [9, 10] but also on their origin related to anthropization processes and use by society [8, 11, 12]. Nevertheless, understanding wetlands’ dynamics and contribution to highly anthropized regions’ functioning requires effort due to their multifunctional nature. Beyond all their contributions, they configure habitats susceptible to invasion, can function as sinks of urban and rural pollution, can present a low species richness, or can become habitats favorable for developing zoonotic vectors and environmental hazards [8–11]. All these possibilities in an urban context usually lead to little investment in their conservation efforts, prioritizing all of them on natural protected areas or Ramsar sites [13–16]. * Leonardo Ariel Datri leonardo.datri@ufouniversidad.edu.ar 1 Laboratorio de Ecología de Bordes, Universidad de Flores, Mengelle 8, Cipolletti, RN, Argentina 2 Instituto Patagónico de Estudios de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (IPEHCS-UNCO-CONICET), Neuquén, Argentina 3 Facultad de Agronomía, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Tandil, Argentina