Biocultural Homogenization in Urban Settings: Public Knowledge of Birds in City Parks of Santiago, Chile

Juan Celis-Diez,Pablo Marquet,Juan Armesto,Cesar Muñoz,Sebastián Abades

doi:10.3390/su9040485

Abstract

An understudied consequence of growing urbanization is the rapid and concurrent loss of native biological and cultural diversity. Here, we measured the concordance between avian species richness in public green areas of the city of Santiago, Chile, and the corresponding knowledge of local citizens of this avian diversity. To assess this correspondence, we sampled avian species richness in 10 representative city parks and surveyed the awareness of avian diversity by park visitors as well as their ability to identify bird species. We found no significant relationship between estimated bird diversity from field sampling and their perception by park visitors, suggesting that visitors underestimate avian diversity in city parks because they perceive only a small fraction of the overall diversity, with their awareness especially biased towards the most abundant species. Exotic bird species comprise the majority of the latter group. This result was observed regardless of whether the city park had high or low bird diversity. Public knowledge of birds did not relate to the species richness present at city parks, and was strongly biased towards the most abundant, widely distributed, and primarily exotic species. This result agrees with the biocultural homogenization hypothesis, documenting the role of urban areas in this global process.

Highlights

Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities [1] and rapid urban expansion is considered an important threat to biodiversity worldwide [2,3]
22 bird species were recorded in our sampling of 10 Santiago city parks, three of these species were introduced or cosmopolitan (Table 3)
Despite the fact that we included in this survey only data from spring 2014, the number of bird species recorded overall (n = 22) was similar to the figure reported in previous studies for urban birds in the city of Santiago

Summary

Introduction

More than half of the world’s population lives in cities [1] and rapid urban expansion is considered an important threat to biodiversity worldwide [2,3]. In addition to rapid biotic homogenization in urban settings, we must add a concomitant strong tendency towards “biocultural homogenization” [7]. This concept implies the loss of awareness and willingness to conserve local nature due to the “extinction of experience” or the lack of face-to-face encounters with local biodiversity [8]. When people living in these same cities were asked to recall the names of three plant species they had seen in their neighborhood, more than 75% of the respondents could only name exotic species. Ballouard et al [10] found that French schoolchildren, strongly influenced by the media, which is overly dominated by a few iconic, and usually non-native species, were more prone to protect unseen, alien species, rather than local native animals

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Results

Conclusion