Street trees reduce the negative effects of
urbanization on birds

Pena, JCDC; Martello, F; Ribeiro, MC; Armitage, RP; Young, RJ; Rodrigues, M

Abstract

The effects of streets on biodiversity is an important aspect of urban ecology, but it has been
neglected worldwide. Several vegetation attributes (e.g. street tree density and diversity)
have important effects on biodiversity and ecological processes. In this study, we evaluated
the influences of urban vegetationÐrepresented by characteristics of street trees (canopy
size, proportion of native tree species and tree species richness)Ðand characteristics of the
landscape (distance to parks and vegetation quantity), and human impacts (human population
size and exposure to noise) on taxonomic data and functional diversity indices of the
bird community inhabiting streets. The study area was the southern region of Belo Horizonte
(Minas Gerais, Brazil), a largely urbanized city in the understudied Neotropical region. Bird
data were collected on 60 point count locations distributed across the streets of the landscape.
We used a series of competing GLM models (using Akaike's information criterion for
small sample sizes) to assess the relative contribution of the different sets of variables to
explain the observed patterns. Seventy-three bird species were observed exploiting the
streets: native species were the most abundant and frequent throughout this landscape.
The bird community's functional richness and Rao's Quadratic Entropy presented values
lower than 0.5. Therefore, this landscape was favoring few functional traits. Exposure to
noise was the most limiting factor for this bird community. However, the average size of
arboreal patches and, especially the characteristics of street trees, were able to reduce
the negative effects of noise on the bird community. These results show the importance of
adequately planning the urban afforestation process: increasing tree species richness, preserving
large trees and planting more native trees species in the streets are management
practices that will increase bird species richness, abundance and community functional
aspects and consequently improve human wellbeing and quality of life.

Citation

urbanization on birds. PLoS ONE, 12(e01744), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174484

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 9, 2017
• Publication Date: Mar 22, 2017
• Deposit Date: Mar 27, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 27, 2017
• Journal: PLoS One
• Electronic ISSN: 1932-6203
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Volume: 12
• Issue: e01744
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174484
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174484
• Related Public URLs: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/