Rapid urbanization over the last several decades has contributed to an unprecedented decline in biodiversity worldwide, as pressures from human population growth in cities and subsequent development of surrounding rural areas have resulted in heightened demand for natural resources, widespread habitat loss and fragmentation, and pollution on a nearly global scale. Projections of global scenarios to the year 2100 indicate that of the five most important determinants of biodiversity loss, land use and land cover change associated with expansion of the built up urban environment will have the most substantial influence on the abundance, richness, and overall community structure of terrestrial and freshwater organisms. The ecosystem impacts of species loss and biotic homogenization include declines in functioning and stability, with important implications for human health and wellbeing, as biodiversity is the foundation for a number of ecosystem services from which people derive countless benefits. Aspects of the built up landscape including housing density and amount of urban development have been studied extensively, but relatively few studies have analyzed the ecosystem effects of spatially explicit patterns of urban form, or the compactness or dispersion of predominantly residential development between rural and urban areas. Using data from the Breeding Bird Atlas, the US Census Bureau, and the NLCD, I investigate the relationship between urban form and avian species richness in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
Results/Conclusions
Mecklenburg County has experienced a tremendous amount of growth in the last several decades, largely as the consequence of growth in the city of Charlotte. The amount of developed land in the county quintupled between 1976 and 2018, from 0.8 to 0.45 acres per capita respectively (Mecklenburg County QOL). A recent report identified Charlotte as having “the worst urban sprawl” of the 15 most sprawling major cities in the United States, ranking Charlotte last in every category including land converted from rural to suburban and urban areas, average metropolitan density, and growth in compact neighborhoods (Hamidi and Ewing 2014). Preliminary results of my analysis are consistent with increasingly accepted notion that compact urban form is preferential to dispersed or sprawling development with regard to preserving native biodiversity in urban areas.