Covariation in urban birds providing cultural services or disservices and people

Abstract

The spatial distributions of biodiversity and people vary across landscapes and are critical to the delivery of ecosystem services and disservices. The high densities of people and often of birds in urban areas lead to frequent human–avian interactions, which can be positive or negative for people's well‐being. The identities of the bird species providing these services or disservices tend to be quite different; however, it is unclear how their abundance and richness covary with human population density, and hence with potential recipients of these services and disservices. We surveyed bird populations in 106 tiles (500 × 500 m) across the 174 km2 of an extended urban area in southern England. From the literature, we identified two groups of species: those associated with positive interactions for human well‐being and those that display behaviours that are negative for human well‐being. We estimated the abundance (adjusted for detection probability) and richness of each group and modelled how they covary with human population density. Aggregation of population estimates for the 35 service and nine disservice species observed revealed 593,128 (95% confidence interval: 541,817–657,046) and 225,491 (200,134–235,066) birds respectively. Across the surveyed tiles, there were 1.09 service and 0.42 disservice birds per person. There was a peaking quadratic relationship between service abundance and human population density, but a negative linear relationship between richness and human density. Conversely, there were positive linear relationships for both abundance and richness of disservice species with human density. The ratio of service to disservice birds shifted from 3.5–1 at intermediate human densities to 1–1 in more densely populated areas. Synthesis and applications. Differences in the distributions of service and disservice species, and the extremely low ratios of birds to people particularly in socioeconomically deprived areas, mean that people there have few opportunities for contact with birds, and the contact they do have is equally likely to be negative as positive for human well‐being. We recommend spatial targeting of improvements in green infrastructure, combined with the targeted provisioning of food and nesting places for service species, to promote positive interactions between birds and people.

Ecosystem disservices matter: Towards their systematic integration within ecosystem service research and policy

“…Similarly, and contrary to the claim that EDS mainly result from mismanagement (Villa et al, 2014), EDS are co-produced by humans and ecosystems (Lyytimäki et al, 2008). For example, cultural EDS (and ES) associated with birds depend on the abundance and richness in bird species populations as well as on human population density, which jointly influence human-avian interactions (Cox et al, 2018). It is only by understanding EDS co-production processes that we will identify ways to mitigate them.…”

The ecology of human–nature interactions

“…More importantly, however, these two factors often have a synergistic effect on the development of human-nature interactions. Two obvious examples are that areas with (i) greater human population density often attract large numbers of wild animals that are adapted to humandominated environments (figure 3c) [41] and (ii) greater opportunities (e.g. popular ecotourism sites) can attract large numbers of people [19].…”

“…(c) Relationship between human population density and abundance of sets of bird species that commonly display behaviours that are negative for human wellbeing (e.g. crow, magpie) in southern England [41]. (d ) Differences between the observed and expected number of records of frog species obtained by the South African Frog Atlas Project within distance bands from cities [42].…”

Terrestrial Vertebrate Invasions in South Africa

“…This has led to a split in public perception where pigeons are seen both as pests (e.g. regarded as flying rats), or an important component of urban wildlife (Cox et al 2018;Harris et al 2016). In South African cities, building managers place deterrents to stop individuals roosting and nesting, but most people in the buildings regard these measures as unnecessary (Harris et al 2016).…”