Urban green spaces contribute in measurable ways to human health, help combat the paucity of natural experience in city-dwellers, and may provide important areas for biodiversity conservation. As urbanization accelerates worldwide, more municipalities are attempting to not only conserve but also construct new green spaces within their borders. Stormwater management, in particular, is more commonly being handled by constructing green infrastructure – planted areas that slow down and treat stormwater rather than merely conveying it outside of the city. Implementing these practices may be one way a city can increase its green space while also accomplishing traditional engineering goals. However, while these structures are routinely studied for their treatment of stormwater, their ecological structure receives little attention, and so the value of the ecosystem services they provide in this regard is vague. Here, we report on the first two years of a long-term study of bird and insect communities in and near a large green infrastructure project ongoing in Columbus, OH. Birds are sampled via passive acoustic monitoring with automatic detection to identify species of interest. The species present in these locations are compared to those at nearby remnant natural areas.
Results/Conclusions
We were able to confirm that passive acoustic monitoring in urban areas yielded estimates of species composition similar to traditional point counts. Preliminary results indicate that 1- and 2-year old bioretention basins (rain gardens) are not yet developed enough to affect avian diversity. However, our method was able to detect several candidate indicator species,as these are reliably more present in nearby natural areas than in lawn control sites. Several of these are tyrant flycatchers, which are particularly amenable to automatic detection due to their unlearned songs. Future work will continue refining the automatic detection process for these and other species.