Urban ecosystems provide unique opportunities and challenges for managing wildlife species and their relationships with people. Currently, wildlife management approaches in cities are often reactive and focus on the removal of individual species when and where they are deemed to be a nuisance. However, in order to take more proactive management approaches, field studies are needed to provide information about the ecological and social factors that drive the dynamics of wildlife communities throughout urban landscapes. With this research, we provide an ecological framework for proactive management by evaluating how a community of mammals and terrestrial birds respond to urbanization in the context of Arizona’s Phoenix metropolitan area. We hypothesized that community composition and structure would vary in relation to several ecological and socioeconomic characteristics associated with urbanization, including urban land cover, vegetation productivity, and human population density. To assess these patterns, we maintained a randomized array of 50 camera traps across a gradient of urbanization in the Phoenix metropolitan area during 2019 and 2020 and modeled the occupancy of native and non-native species.
Results/Conclusions
Results from summer 2019 demonstrate strong responses of the wildlife community to biophysical urbanization metrics, including an overall decline in species richness with increasing urban land cover and decreasing vegetation productivity. Further, findings suggest that socioeconomic characteristics in the city can serve as important predictors of habitat heterogeneity in support of urban biodiversity. While evidence indicates that both ecological and social factors can be important drivers of wildlife communities in cities, there are often mismatches in the spatial and temporal scales of existing urban ecological and social datasets that presents considerable challenges to their integration. Furthermore, the social drivers shaping wildlife communities may vary among cities due to their unique historical and current social contexts. This diversity among cities highlights the need for interdisciplinary efforts to explore drivers of urban biodiversity across a multi-city framework. In spite of these obstacles, this research demonstrates the important role that urban ecosystems provide for interdisciplinary investigations of the factors shaping diverse wildlife communities and their interactions with people.