Abstract
Private gardens provide habitat and resources for many birds living in human-dominated landscapes. While wild bird feeding is recognised as one of the most popular forms of human-wildlife interaction, almost nothing is known about the use of bird baths. This citizen science initiative explores avian assemblages at bird baths in private gardens in south-eastern Australia and how this differs with respect to levels of urbanisation and bioregion. Overall, 992 citizen scientists collected data over two, four-week survey periods during winter 2014 and summer 2015 (43% participated in both years). Avian assemblages at urban and rural bird baths differed between bioregions with aggressive nectar-eating species influenced the avian assemblages visiting urban bird baths in South Eastern Queensland, NSW North Coast and Sydney Basin while introduced birds contributed to differences in South Western Slopes, Southern Volcanic Plains and Victorian Midlands. Small honeyeaters and other small native birds occurred less often at urban bird baths compared to rural bird baths. Our results suggest that differences between urban versus rural areas, as well as bioregion, significantly influence the composition of avian assemblages visiting bird baths in private gardens. We also demonstrate that citizen science monitoring of fixed survey sites such as bird baths is a useful tool in understanding large-scale patterns in avian assemblages which requires a vast amount of data to be collected across broad areas.
Highlights
In almost every continent, urbanisation has transformed landscapes for humans and wildlife with much of this transformation occurring over the last few centuries
Significant differences in bird assemblages were detected at bird baths between bioregions and between urban and rural areas (Table 1)
For the winter survey three of these bioregions (South East Queensland, NSW North Coast and Sydney Basin) exhibited differences, for these bioregions differences were evident in both seasons (Fig 1, Table 2)
Summary
Urbanisation has transformed landscapes for humans and wildlife with much of this transformation occurring over the last few centuries. Australian cities, for example, have been transformed from pristine habitat to highly modified urban environments in only c. As the world becomes increasingly urbanised, understanding how to conserve biodiversity in increasingly modified and novel environments has become a major. Additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific role of this author is articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section
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