Abstract
The Eurasian Collared-Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) is one of the most successful invasive bird species across the world. Worryingly, the invasive dove is a known reservoir of many diseases, some of which can potentially infect mammals (including human beings). Additionally, aggressive behaviors have been recorded toward other bird species resulting in territory and nest usurpation. Thus, the presence of this species poses an important risk for native species with similar habits, particularly in insular systems. Based on this, we carried out this study to assess the density and distribution of the Eurasian Collared-Dove in the island of Cozumel, as well as to evaluate the relationship between their abundance and the environmental characteristics of the places they inhabit. We estimated their distance-corrected densities in the island's largest town and performed an inverse distance weighting (IDW) interpolation to visualize their distribution. We performed a generalized linear model (GLM) to assess relationships between the environmental variables and the abundance of doves using a reduced model procedure. We obtained 137 records of doves present in 94% of all survey sites and an estimated density of 6.8 ind/ha, for a total of 6,670 doves in San Miguel de Cozumel. We did not find a spatial pattern of the dove's distribution on the urban setting, but we found an interaction between their abundances with tree cover and building height. Our findings, together with previous evidence of infection risk and aggressive behavior, make this species a threat to the native species communities of fragile ecosystems such as the island of Cozumel.
Highlights
The Eurasian Collared-Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) is one of the most successful known invasive bird species with an impressive population growth worldwide (Romagosa and McEneaney 1999)
This dove is known to be reservoir of many diseases with potential zoonotic effects toward wildlife, such as the Newcastle disease (Terregino et al 2003), the West Nile Virus (Panella et al 2013), and avian chlamydiosis (Chlamydia psittaci; Donati et al 2015), which can potentially infect mammals (Beckmann et al 2014)
The depiction of the interpolated data using inverse distance weighting (IDW) does not show clear spatial patterns across San Miguel de Cozumel (Fig. 2). This finding could be related to the result of the reduced generalized linear model (GLM), which shows that two of the measured variables were significantly related, both negatively, with the presence/abundance of the Eurasian Collared-Dove: (i) tree cover (χ21,33 = 45.5, P = 0.03), and (ii) maximum building height (χ21,32 = 39.0, P = 0.01)
Summary
The Eurasian Collared-Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) is one of the most successful known invasive bird species with an impressive population growth worldwide (Romagosa and McEneaney 1999). The Eurasian Collared-Dove has been found to be aggressive toward native species, such as a case of nest usurpation of American Robins (Turdus migratorius) recorded on Texas (Kasner and Pyeatt 2016). This dove is known to be reservoir of many diseases with potential zoonotic effects toward wildlife, such as the Newcastle disease (Terregino et al 2003), the West Nile Virus (Panella et al 2013), and avian chlamydiosis (Chlamydia psittaci; Donati et al 2015), which can potentially infect mammals (including human beings) (Beckmann et al 2014)
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