Thu, Aug 18, 2022: 2:45 PM-3:00 PM
513C
Background/Question/MethodsHuman-driven environmental changes shape ecological communities from local to global scales. In cities, landscape patterns in the built environment generally drive the diversity of wildlife species, but local community responses may also be shaped by larger-scale dynamic factors that vary across cities at regional to continental scales, including species pools and environmental conditions such as climate, vegetation, water availability, and urban growth patterns. In partnership with the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN), we used remote camera data from 20 North American metropolitan areas to construct multi-region, multi-species occupancy models to evaluate the importance of species traits (body size and carnivory) and ecoregional characteristics (temperature, vegetation productivity, urban intensity, natural patch density, and city age) in estimating response of wildlife species presence and diversity to human development.
Results/ConclusionsSupporting our prediction that both the amount and configuration of natural habitat areas would affect community characteristics, we found that the occupancy and species diversity of the 37 native mammal species studied declined with increasing urban land cover but increased with a greater density of natural area patches. As well, larger-bodied species were most strongly and negatively impacted by urbanization across cities. Two regional environmental variables – temperature and vegetation productivity – were found to substantially influence relationships between urbanization and species diversity and occupancy. Mammal species occupancy and diversity were more negatively associated with urban intensity in warmer cities and in cities with lower overall productivity, highlighting how synergies between changing climate and urbanization may produce variable ecological consequences. By testing the scalability of relationships between landscape heterogeneity and wildlife community composition, these results also provide general insight into how broad environmental factors may interact across multiple spatial scales to support biodiversity in ever-changing human-dominated systems.
Results/ConclusionsSupporting our prediction that both the amount and configuration of natural habitat areas would affect community characteristics, we found that the occupancy and species diversity of the 37 native mammal species studied declined with increasing urban land cover but increased with a greater density of natural area patches. As well, larger-bodied species were most strongly and negatively impacted by urbanization across cities. Two regional environmental variables – temperature and vegetation productivity – were found to substantially influence relationships between urbanization and species diversity and occupancy. Mammal species occupancy and diversity were more negatively associated with urban intensity in warmer cities and in cities with lower overall productivity, highlighting how synergies between changing climate and urbanization may produce variable ecological consequences. By testing the scalability of relationships between landscape heterogeneity and wildlife community composition, these results also provide general insight into how broad environmental factors may interact across multiple spatial scales to support biodiversity in ever-changing human-dominated systems.