Anthropogenic biodiversity and geodiversity - can legacy industrial waste help offset falling global biodiversity?

Biodiversity is usually associated with rural/'natural'/'pristine'/'untamed' landscapes. Urban landscapes tend not to be thought of as being biodiverse and often aren't. This means that most communities, particularly those in urban areas, are to an extent divorced from nature and biodiversity. Biodiversity, starting with the plant communities underpinning the food web, are strongly influenced by the substrate (rock/soil) they are growing on, with variations in substrate type - geodiversity - resulting in variation in plant and animal communities.
Geodiversity faces pressures from human influence (e.g.1,2). However, human influence can also broaden geodiversity. For example, the spoil heaps from legacy base-metal mining activities in the Peak District control plant community composition through elevated levels of ecotoxic metals such as Pb3,4.
The aim of this project is to investigate the extent to which anthropogenic substrates enhance urban biodiversity and why.
This is of great importance as there is potential for undocumented urban biodiversity hosted on anthropogenic geodiversity to partially offset falling global biodiversity