Validation of a globally-applicable method to measure urban tolerance of birds using citizen science data

• Understanding species-specific responses to urbanization is essential to mitigate and preserve biodiversity in the face of increasing urbanization, but a major challenge is how to estimate urban tolerances for a wide array of species applicable over disparate regions. A promising approach is to assess urban tolerance by integrating georeferenced information on species detections from citizen science data with estimations of urbanization intensity based on remotely-sensed night-time lights. While such citizen science urbanness scores (CSUS) are cost-effective, intuitive, and easily-repeatable anywhere in the world, whether the scores accurately describe urban tolerance still awaits empirical verification. By analysing > 900 bird species worldwide, we find that CSUS cor relates well with a standard measure of urban tolerance based on changes in abundance between urbanized and non-urbanized nearby habitats. Our analyses show that there is substantial variability in the relationship between these two metrics, but nevertheless highlights the potential for the CSUS approach in the future. Future improvements to the index, including incorporating rare species, and understanding the influence of intraspecific variability in response to urbanization, will be necessary to maximize the broad utility of the approach.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Big data

Biodiversity

Birds

Citizen science

Urban tolerance

Urban

ecology

urbanization

diversity

pollution

models

life

Biodiversity & Conservation

Environmental Sciences & Ecology

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)