Rachel Fanelli MSc Candidate, Bonier Lab Quantifying responses of North American birds to urbanization Species vary in their responses to urbanization – most species avoid urban habitats, some tolerate these environments, and very few thrive in them. To better characterize the extent to which species vary in their responses to urbanization (hereafter urban responses), we developed several methods to quantify these responses at a continental scale across all birds. Using open access community science-derived data from the eBird Status and Trends Products and two different types of high-resolution geospatial data that quantify urbanization of landscapes, we calculated urban response indices for 476 species with breeding ranges that overlap large cities in Canada or the United States. We used six different calculations to characterize species-level urban response indices, allowing us to assess how each species’ relative abundance during the breeding season varied with estimates of urbanization. We assessed correlations among these six indices, then compressed them into a single principal component (multivariate urban response index) that captured variation in urban responses among species. We demonstrated the accuracy of our multivariate urban response index using 24 species that are well characterized in their tolerance or avoidance of urban habitat, as well as with previously published, independent urban response estimates for 99 species. We found a significant phylogenetic signal in the multivariate urban response index for younger lineages but not among deeper lineages, suggesting that traits associated with urban responses are not highly conserved. Our study provides some of the most precise estimates of species' responses to urbanization to date.
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