3D urban built form shapes avian richness in green spaces

Keywords: Urban Biodiversity, Urban Form, eBird, Built Environment, Urban Morphology, Remote Sensing
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Urban biodiversity plays an important role in ecological processes and ecosystem services within cities, making conservation a priority in many municipal sustainability plans. Urban green spaces (UGS) have been a key strategy for conservation in cities by providing habitat for wildlife, including avian communities. While most of the research has centered around habitat attributes of green spaces, less attention has been given to the ways in which the built environment may influence avian outcomes in these spaces. Furthermore, when examined, the built environment has largely been characterized as homogenous and two-dimensional (2D); however, cities are heterogeneous and three-dimensional (3D). This study addresses this gap by using geospatial methods to characterize and quantify the built environment’s composition and configuration patterns in 2D and 3D along with employing ecological modeling techniques to get accurate spatial distributions of avian communities across UGS. This analysis was conducted using high resolution land cover data, LiDAR data, and twenty years of bird occurrence data from the eBird community science program in well-surveyed UGS in Los Angeles, California. Relationships between avian communities and the urban landscape, both at the habitat level of the UGS and the landscape scale of the surrounding built environment, were tested using generalized linear models. The size of the UGS had the strongest impact on avian communities, but variation in the built environment, both 2D and 3D, also shaped outcomes and changed based on species traits.