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The Role of Landscape-Scale Factors in Shaping Urban Bird Communities

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Ecology and Conservation of Birds in Urban Environments

Abstract

The composition of urban bird communities is clearly affected by local habitat factors. These factors often determine whether individuals choose to occupy urban habitats and how they behave and reproduce once they are there. However, landscape-scale factors also play a major role in the shaping of urban bird communities. Most commonly, these are elements of the landscape for which heterogeneity can be meaningfully measured at scales of 500–2500 m. The influence of landscape-scale factors is studied using two approaches—the island biogeography approach and the urbanization gradient approach. Commonly influential factors include the remnant habitat patch size, degree of urbanization, road density, amount of tree or paved area cover and land use (a proxy for human disturbance). While there are no consistent patterns governing the responses of overall species diversity and community composition to landscape-scale factors, when species are grouped by life history guilds, consistent patterns emerge. When considered in conjunction with local habitat factors, research about the effects of landscape-scale factors provides valuable implications for the conservation of avian biodiversity in urban environments, especially when specific species and guilds are the targets of conservation efforts.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Central Arizona Phoenix—Long-Term Ecological Research project at Arizona State University, USA—for creating an environment where the ideas and synthesis in this chapter could be discussed and developed and for funding a portion of J. Litteral’s research. Additionally, we would also like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Ridder for valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85281, USA

    Jennifer Litteral

  2. Yeruham Center of Ornithology and Ecology, Yeruham, 8051545, Israel

    Eyal Shochat

  3. Department of Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 653, Be’er-Sheva, 84104, Israel

    Eyal Shochat

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  1. Jennifer Litteral
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Correspondence to Jennifer Litteral .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. G.V. Marqués del Turia, Grupo para el Estudio de las Aves, Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Enrique Murgui

  2. Department of Forest Resource Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden

    Marcus Hedblom

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Litteral, J., Shochat, E. (2017). The Role of Landscape-Scale Factors in Shaping Urban Bird Communities. In: Murgui, E., Hedblom, M. (eds) Ecology and Conservation of Birds in Urban Environments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43314-1_8

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