Testing the Likeable, Therefore Abundant Hypothesis: Bird Species Likeability by Urban Residents Varies Significantly with Species Traits

Lillian Collins,Grant D Paton,Sara A Gagné

doi:10.3390/land10050487

Abstract

The urbanization of landscapes filters bird communities to favor particular species traits, driven in part by the changes that homeowners make to the amount and quality of habitat in yards. We suggest that an ultimate driver of these proximate mechanisms underlying bird community change with respect to urbanization is the likeability of species traits by urban residents. We hypothesize that bird species likeability, modulated by species traits, influences the degree to which homeowners alter the availability and quality of habitat on their properties and thereby affects species population sizes in urbanized landscapes. We refer to this new hypothesis as the Likeable, therefore Abundant Hypothesis. The Likeable, therefore Abundant Hypothesis predicts that (1) bird species likeability varies with species morphological and behavioral traits, (2) homeowners use trait-based likeability as a motivator to modify habitat availability and quality on their properties, and (3) residential habitat availability and quality influences species populations at landscape scales. We tested the first prediction of the Likeable, therefore Abundant Hypothesis using a survey of 298 undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who were asked to rank their preferences for 85 forest generalist and edge/open country songbird species grouped according to 10 morphological and behavioral traits. Survey respondents preferred very small, primarily blue or black species that are insectivorous, aerial or bark foragers, residents, and culturally unimportant. On the other hand, respondents disliked large or very large, primarily yellow or orange species that forage on the ground and/or forage by flycatching, are migratory, and are culturally important. If the Likeable, therefore Abundant Hypothesis is true, natural resource managers and planners could capitalize on the high likeability of species that are nevertheless negatively affected by urbanization to convince homeowners and residents to actively manage their properties for species conservation.

Highlights

Residential development is the dominant form of urbanization in the US [1,2] and often results in the loss and fragmentation of forest [3,4,5,6]
Bird species that are more common in urbanized landscapes tend to be those that have larger body sizes, wingspans, and brain sizes; are resident; are omnivorous, granivorous, or frugivorous; nest in cavities or have medium to high nesting heights; exhibit sociality and/or biparental involvement in nest construction; and have larger clutch sizes, more fledglings per clutch, multiple clutches per year, and spend longer in the nest after hatching [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
The specific mechanisms underlying this filtering of the bird community by urbanization have not been tested but likely include the changes that homeowners make to the amount and quality of habitat in their yards, such as providing bird feeders and nest boxes, maintaining large areas of lawn with irrigation and pesticides, favoring seed- and fruit-producing ornamental plants and trees, and owning domestic cats (e.g., [18,19])

Summary

Introduction

Residential development is the dominant form of urbanization in the US [1,2] and often results in the loss and fragmentation of forest [3,4,5,6]. US, residential development replaced 15% of conifer and 23% of hardwood forest between. 2001 and 2011, leading to losses of core forest area (forest more than 100 m from an edge) of as much as 71% [6]. The urbanization of landscapes leads to marked changes in the community composition of wildlife, such as birds. The specific mechanisms underlying this filtering of the bird community by urbanization have not been tested but likely include the changes that homeowners make to the amount and quality of habitat in their yards, such as providing bird feeders and nest boxes, maintaining large areas of lawn with irrigation and pesticides, favoring seed- and fruit-producing ornamental plants and trees, and owning domestic cats (e.g., [18,19])

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion