Human‐associated species dominate passerine communities across the United States

Abstract

Aim Human development and agriculture can have transformative and homogenizing effects on natural systems, shifting the composition of ecological communities towards non‐native and native species that tolerate or thrive under human‐dominated conditions. These impacts cannot be fully captured by summarizing species presence, as they include dramatic changes to patterns of species abundance. However, how human land use patterns and species invasions intersect to shape patterns of abundance and dominance within ecological communities is poorly understood even in well‐known taxa. Location Conterminous United States. Time period 2010–2012. Major taxa studied Passeriformes. Methods We analyse continental‐scale monitoring data to study the proportional abundance of non‐native and native synanthropic species within passerine bird communities. Synanthropic species are those that benefit from an association with humans. We estimate how the amount and configuration of human development and agriculture relate to the degree to which human‐associated species dominate passerine communities across the continent. Results Human‐associated species comprised the majority of detected passerine individuals across two‐thirds of bird surveys. Non‐native and synanthropic species responded differently to land cover and reached highest relative abundance in different portions of the continent. The proportional abundance of synanthropic birds increased rapidly with development, but was not related to the configuration of land cover. The proportion of non‐native individuals was higher when intensively‐used land cover was more aggregated. Main conclusions Even low amounts of intensively‐used lands were associated with a dramatic reshaping of passerine communities, with consequences for patterns of relative abundance across the continent.

Fast grid search and bootstrap‐based inference for continuous two‐phase polynomial regression models

“…There may be autocorrelation between routes as nearby routes are likely to share avian species. However, sensitivity analyses using spatially thinned datasets and plotting of residuals over space suggested that the level of autocorrelation at the route scale was low in this dataset (Sofaer et al, 2020, Supplementary Materials).…”

“…The song bird dataset comprises data collected in a recently published study on how human land use patterns impact the proportional abundance of synanthropic species, which benefit from an association with humans, within song bird communities in the conterminous United States (Sofaer et al, 2020) based on North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) (Pardieck et al, 2017) data from 2010 to 2012. The dataset has 1649 rows with each row corresponding to one survey covering a 24.5‐mile route.…”

“…Segmented polynomial regression models (in particular continuous two‐phase polynomial regression models) are widely used in practice. The three real datasets from public health (Eppright et al, 1972; Gallant & Fuller, 1973), ecology (Sofaer et al, 2020) and physics (Holst et al, 1996) that will be used to illustrate our proposed methods are shown in Figure 2.…”

“…(a) Infant and preschool boys weight‐height ratio by age (Eppright et al, 1972). (b) Proportion of synanthropic song birds versus land use intensity (Sofaer et al, 2020). (c) LIDAR (Holst et al, 1996)…”

Influence of landscape condition on relative abundance and body condition of two generalist freshwater turtle species

“…Much research has been devoted to documenting and quantifying negative impacts of anthropogenic land use changes on wildlife, such as declines in density and local extirpation of populations (Crawford & Bolen, 1976; Wilberg et al., 2011), lower fitness of individuals (Li et al., 2016; Slabbekoorn & Ripmeester, 2008), reduced genetic diversity (Holderegger & Di Giulio, 2010; Miraldo et al., 2016), and behavioral changes (Andersen et al., 2017; Longcore & Rich, 2004). A major outcome of broad‐scale anthropogenic land use change is the loss of habitat specialists and gain of habitat generalist and synanthropic species (including invasive species), with the consequent homogenization of wildlife communities (Clavel et al., 2010; Sofaer et al., 2020).…”