Functional Homogenization Effect of Urbanization on Bird Communities

Abstract:  We studied the community richness and dynamics of birds in landscapes recently affected by urbanization to test the prediction that biotic communities living in degraded landscapes are increasingly composed of generalist species. We analyzed bird communities in 657 plots monitored by the French Breeding Bird Survey from 2001 to 2005, accounting for the probability of species detection and spatial autocorrelation. We used an independent land-cover program to assess urbanization intensity in each FBBS plot, from 1992 to 2002. We found that urbanization induced community homogenization and that populations of specialist species became increasingly unstable with increasing urbanization of the landscape. Our results emphasize that urbanization has a substantial impact on the spatial component of communities and highlight the destabilizing effect of urbanization on communities over time. These results illustrate that urbanization may be a strong driving force in functional community composition and that measuring community homogenization is a powerful tool in the assessment of the effects of landscape changes and thus aides sustainable urban planning.