The Effects of Urban Sprawl on Birds at Multiple Levels of Biological Organization

By R. Blair. 2004

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Urban sprawl affects the environment in myriad ways and at multiple levels of biological organization. In this paper I explore the effects of sprawl on native bird communities by comparing the occurrence of birds along gradients of urban land use in southwestern Ohio and northern California and by examining patterns at the individual, species, community, landscape, and continental levels. I do this by assessing the distribution and abundance of all bird species occupying sites of differing land-use intensity in Ohio and California. Additionally, I conducted predation experiments using artificial nests, tracked the nest fate of American Robins and Northern Cardinals, and assessed land cover in these sites. At the individual level, predation on artificial nests decreased with urbanization; however, this trend was not reflected in the nesting success of robins and cardinals, which did not increase with urbanization. At the species level, sprawl affected local patterns of extinction and invasion; the density of different species peaked at different levels of urbanization. At the community level, species richness and diversity peaked at moderate levels of urbanization, and the number of low-nesting species and of species with multiple broods increased with urbanization. The community-level results may reflect both the species-level patterns of local extinction and invasion as well as broader landscape-level patterns. At the landscape level, a linear combination of spatial heterogeneity and density of woody patches accurately predicted both species richness and Shannon Diversity. At the continental level, local extinction of endemic species, followed by the invasion of ubiquitous weedy species, leads to faunal homogenization between ecoregions.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c26a64a2052587022c8420bd182358eacc5cdf06

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Citations in the corpus

Biotic homogenization and alien bird species along an urban gradient in South Africa (2009, background): “This study attempts a whole-community synthesis (Blair, 2004), taking into account multiple species, their interspecific relationships, and spatial and environmental variables.”
How do habitat variability and management regime shape the spatial heterogeneity of birds within a large Mediterranean urban park (2008, result): “Our results differ, however, in some important ways from hose of previous studies that focused on urbanization gradients Blair, 2004; Clergeau et al., 2006).”
Forecasting faunal and floral homogenization associated with human population geography in North America (2006, methodology): “Indeed, quantitative evidence for this association exists at small spatial scales for birds (Blair, 2001, 2004; Jokimäki and Kaisanlahti-Jokimäki, 2003; Crooks et al., 2004) and fishes (Walters et al., 2003), although much progress is still needed on this topic (see subsequent papers in this…”
Habitat selection of breeding riparian birds in an urban environment: untangling the relative importance of biophysical elements and spatial scale (2011, background): “Indeed, several native species do appear to be urban intolerant, especially many long-distance migrants (e.g., Blair, 2004).”
Island biogeography for an urbanizing world: how extinction and colonization may determine biological diversity in human-dominated landscapes (2005, background): “If land transformation increases habitat heterogeneity, and invading species do not dramatically consume or compete with native species, high local diversity may be maintained (Leopold, 1933; Blair, 1996, 2004; Porter et al., 2001).”
On defining and quantifying biotic homogenization (2006, background): “Similarly, Blair (2004) reported that the homogenization of bird communities in response to urbanization (another form of anthropogenic disturbance) was the result of the replacement of specialist, urban-sensitive species by generalist, non-native species more adapted to urban environments.”