Estimates of species-level tolerance of urban habitat in North American birds.

Abstract

Species vary in their responses to urban habitat; most species avoid these environments, whereas others tolerate or even thrive in them. To better characterize the extent to which species vary in their responses to urban habitat (from this point forwards "urban tolerance"), we used 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 tolerance for 432 species with breeding ranges that overlap large cities in Canada or the USA. We developed six different calculations to characterize species-level urban tolerance, allowing us to assess how each species' relative abundance across their breeding range varied with estimates of urban habitat use and intensity. We assessed correlations among these six indices, then compressed the two best-performing indices into a single principal component (multivariate urban tolerance index) that captured variation in urban tolerance among species. We assessed the accuracy of our single and multivariate urban tolerance indices using 24 test species that have been well characterized for their tolerance or avoidance of the urban habitat, as well as with previously published, independent urban tolerance estimates. Here, we provide this new dataset of species-level urban tolerance estimates that improves upon previous metrics by incorporating continental-scale, continuous estimates that better differentiate species' tolerance of urban habitat compared with existing, categorical methods. These refined metrics can be used to test hypotheses that link ecological, life history, and behavioral traits to avian urban tolerance. The dataset is licensed as CC-By Attribution 4.0 International. Users must appropriately cite the data paper and dataset if used in publications and scientific presentations.