Space-for-time substitutions exaggerate urban bird-habitat ecological relationships.

ABSTRACT: North American bird abundance has declined by 29% over the last 50 years. These continental population dynamics interact with local landscape changes to affect local bird diversity. Mitigating local declines in cities is particularly significant because (a) such declines greatly impact human-bird relationships since most people live in cities and (b) cities provide levers to create bird-friendly habitat, such as managing yards and gardens, street trees, and urban parks. Yet, the potential for cities to modify habitats to mitigate broader bird declines remains unclear. Studies have been stymied by the difficulty of assembling mutidecadal habitat-bird population datasets. Instead, studies have substituted space for time (e.g. used habitat associations across space at one time point to projec

SUBMITTER: Eyster HN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11615266 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature