Raptor breeding sites indicate high plant biodiversity in urban ecosystems

Haruki Natsukawa,Hiroki Yuasa,Shizuko Komuro,Fabrizio Sergio

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-00556-4

Abstract

Preserving biodiversity in urban ecosystems has become an urgent conservation priority, given the rapid upsurge in global urbanization. As woody plants play essential ecological roles and provide psychological benefits to human city dwellers, their preservation is of particular interest to conservation scientists. However, considering that extensive censuses of woody plants are resource-intensive, a key accomplishment is to find reliable conservation proxies that can be quickly used to locate biologically diverse areas. Here, we test the idea that sites occupied by apex predators can indicate high overall biodiversity, including high diversity of woody plants. To this end, we surveyed woody plant species within 500 m of Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) breeding sites in urban ecosystems of Japan and compared them with non-breeding control sites without goshawks. We found that goshawks successfully identified and signposted high levels of richness, abundance, and diversity of woody plants. Our findings show that sites occupied by top predatory species could be exploited as conservation proxies for high plant diversity. Due to their exigent ecological requirements, we would expect apex predators to be tied to high biodiversity levels in many other urban ecosystems worldwide.

Highlights

Charisma typical of these iconic species facilitates the approval and donation of funding for their conservation by citizens and governments[14]
The generalized linear model (GLM) analyses to examine the effectiveness of goshawks as surrogates of woody plant diversity confirmed that woody plant richness, abundance, and diversity significantly increased with goshawk presence (Figs. 1 and 2)
This implied that goshawk breeding sites can be a reliable proxy for woody plant biodiversity in these urban ecosystems

Summary

Introduction

Charisma typical of these iconic species facilitates the approval and donation of funding for their conservation by citizens and governments[14]. A stronger demonstration of the indicator capability of a potential biodiversity surrogate species requires testing of broader links between such species and background taxa that are as ecologically distant from it as possible (e.g., in this case, as trophically disconnected as possible and belonging to taxonomic groups that are as different as possible). Such demonstration would give us more confidence in the wider ecosystem-level value of the indicator species. They account for more than 90% of the global terrestrial biomass 24, and their diversity bears important consequences for the quality of life of human city d wellers[5]

Methods

Results

Conclusion