Light and noise pollution impacts specialist wildlife species disproportionately

Abstract

Global expansion of lighting and noise pollution alters how animals receive and interpret environmental cues. Yet we lack a cross-taxon understanding of how animal traits influence species vulnerability to this growing phenomenon. This knowledge is needed to improve the design and implementation of policies that mitigate or reduce sensory pollutants. We present results from an expert knowledge survey that quantified the relative influence of several ecological, anatomical, and physiological traits on the vulnerability of terrestrial vertebrates to elevated levels of anthropogenic lighting and noise. Our findings, based on 280 responses, highlight the increasing recognition among experts that sensory pollutants are important to consider in management and conservation decisions. Participant responses show mounting threats to species with narrow niches; especially habitat specialists, nocturnal species, and those with the greatest ability to differentiate environmental visual and auditory cues. Our results call attention to the threat specialist species face and provide a generalizable understanding of which species require additional considerations when developing conservation policies and mitigation strategies in a world altered by expanding sensory pollutant footprints. We provide a step-by-step example for translating these results to on-the-ground conservation planning using two species as case studies.

Artificial night light and anthropogenic noise interact to influence bird abundance over a continental scale

“…Even though comparable research found the light gathering ability explains nesting responses during the breeding season (Senzaki et al, 2020), in our study this trait was unrelated to changes in abundance of predominantly non‐breeding birds with respect to artificial night light. As such, rather than using anatomical traits, non‐breeding bird responses could be predicted by traits representing ecological sensitivities, such as activity patterns, trophic level, vagility, and habitat specializations (Ditmer et al, 2021).…”

“…To further investigate how birds perceive and respond to noise, future research should test the relationship between intrinsic traits that represent anatomical and physiological sensitivities to sound. For example, in a survey that ranked the degree of traits impacting the survival, persistence and performance of a species, experts identified the ability to discriminate in noisy environments, auditory spectral resolution, and auditory bandwidth as the most plausible traits to predict vertebrate sensitivity to noise (Ditmer et al, 2021).…”

A framework for untangling the consequences of artificial light at night on species interactions

“…for crepuscular species under ALAN such as insectivorous birds in urban environments [8]), whereas other species are experiencing a contracted temporal niche, such as nocturnal rodents that are only active under very dim conditions [9]. In both scenarios, the evolved traits that are adaptive under one temporal niche may now become maladaptive and result in a shift in the coevolutionary relationship between two species [10].…”