Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Effects Of Urbanization On Native Bird Species In Three Southwestern Us Cities, Christopher B. Hensley, Christopher H. Trisos, Paige S. Warren, Jennie Macfarland, Steve Blumenshine, Joshua Reece, Madhusudan Katti

Environmental Conservation Faculty Publication Series

Urbanization presents novel challenges to native species by altering both the biotic and abiotic environment. Studies have attempted to make generalizations about how species with similar traits respond to urbanization, although existing results are idiosyncratic across cities and often fail to account for seasonality. Here, we present a comparative study in three US cities: Fresno, California; Tucson, Arizona; and Phoenix, Arizona. Using presence-absence data to define regional bird species pools and urban assemblages in non-breeding (winter) and breeding (spring) seasons, we tested whether urban avian assemblages were a random subset of regional assemblages on the basis of both traits and …