Breeding bird sensitivity to urban habitat quality is multi-scale and strongly dependent on migratory behavior

Abstract

Human-caused conversion of natural habitat areas to developed land cover represents a major driver of habitat loss and fragmentation, leading to reorganization of biological communities. Although protected areas and urban greenspaces can preserve natural systems in fragmented landscapes, their efficacy has been stymied by the complexity and scale-dependency underlying biological communities. While migratory bird communities are easy to-study and particularly responsive to anthropogenic habitat alterations, prior studies have documented substantial variation in habitat sensitivity across species and migratory groups. This may make approaches that explicitly consider the hierarchical nature of ecological organization useful for planning and decision-making, particularly in developed landscapes. Herein, we leverage regional vegetation and breeding bird monitoring efforts to investigate the influences of spatial scale, urbanization, and migratory habit on breeding bird occupancy across Cleveland Metroparks, a large urban park system in Ohio. Using multispecies occupancy models, we found that fine-scale vegetation covariates were more predictive of bird community dynamics than landscape-level covariates, suggesting positive benefits of vegetation management activities for breeding bird communities. We also found that short-distance migrants were positively associated with plants that have broad ecological tolerances and that tropical migrants were more negatively associated with human development than other migratory groups. While local vegetation management may be effective for protecting sensitive breeding bird communities, many tropical migrants required intact forests with low human development and may require targeted habitat management for continued breeding-season occupancy. More broadly, this study emphasizes how avian management strategies in developed landscapes should consider features at multiple spatial scales—as well as species-specific migratory behaviors.