The influence of urban park characteristics on bird diversity in Nanjing, China

Abstract

Background Habitat loss, fragmentation and decrease of habitat quality caused by urbanization have led to a dramatic decline in biodiversity worldwide. For highly urbanized areas, parks have become “islands” or habitat fragments for wildlife. As an important indicator group of urban ecosystem health, the response of birds to urbanization has attracted the global attention of ecologists. Understanding the key factors affecting bird diversity in urbanized environment is crucial to the protection of biodiversity in urban ecosystems. Methods We used the line-transect method to survey birds in 37 urban parks in Nanjing, China. We also measured a number of park characteristics (area, isolation, shape index, environmental noise, distance to city center, and habitat diversity) that are commonly assumed to influence bird diversity. We then used the information-theoretic multi-model inference approach to determine which park characteristics had significant impacts on bird species richness. Results We found that park area, habitat diversity and the distance to city center were the best positive predictors of bird species richness in Nanjing urban parks. By contrast, park isolation, park shape and environmental noise had little or no influence on bird diversity. Conclusions Our study highlights the importance of park area, habitat diversity and the distance to city center in determining bird diversity in Nanjing city parks. Therefore, from a conservation viewpoint, we recommend that large parks with complex and diverse habitats far away from the city center should be retained or constructed to increase bird diversity in urban design and planning.

Nestedness and underlying processes of bird assemblages in Nanjing urban parks

“…Most of the parks are distributed in several administrative districts with high level of urbanization ( Figure 1 ). These parks were selected to exhibit gradient changes in the landscape variables, including park area, isolation, habitat type, building index, and human disturbance ( Yang et al 2020 ). For example, the area of parks ranged from 2.20 to 514.68 ha, the isolation from the species pool ranged from 19.50 to 1,4341.71 m, and the number of habitat types varied from 2 to 12 ( Table 1 ).…”

Taxonomic, Phylogenetic and Functional Diversity of Bird Assemblages in Urban Green Spaces: Null Model Analyses, Temporal Variation and Ecological Drivers

“…More specifically, we hypothesized that bird assemblages in the most heavily transformed sites would show a clustered phylogenetic and functional pattern considering that some lineages and traits could be favored by urban areas (Sol et al, 2014;Evans et al, 2018). A third hypothesis was that bird diversity, measured in any of its dimensions, would increase as green space area and habitat heterogeneity increased based on existing information (Matthies et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2020;Benitez et al, 2021).…”

Niche Analysis and Conservation of Bird Species Using Urban Core Areas

“…In addition, environmental variables at the local scale are often more important than regional ones in determining species distribution and community composition in urban landscapes [38][39][40][41]. Such variables include patch level variables (e.g., green space size, amount of gray, tree, shrub and bare ground cover [6,26,35,42]), matrix level variables (e.g., distance from the city edge and center, building height [37,43,44]) and disturbance variables (e.g., anthropogenic noise, pedestrian and car traffic [45][46][47]).…”