Abstract
Human population growth and changing settlement patterns fuel the development of urban fringe lands worldwide, with implications for biodiversity. We conducted a 12-year study of birds in the fast-developing urban fringe lands of the central Puget Sound region, Washington, USA, to examine the effect of development configuration on birds. We hypothesized that lower-intensity conservation developments, compared to higher-intensity planned community developments, would benefit the overall bird community, as well as native forest birds (avoiders of human development) and avian generalist species (adapters to human development), but that higher-intensity planned community developments would benefit synanthropic species (exploiters of human development). We fit single-species and multi-species occupancy models to test these hypotheses. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that a greater proportion of the overall community, avoiders, and adapters occupied lower-intensity conservation developments compared to higher-intensity planned community developments. However, we did not detect an effect of development type on the exploiter guild, and we found that species in the exploiter guild are variable in their response to the configuration of suburban developments. We also hypothesized that human tolerance guilds would be a useful predictor of individual species responses to development type. This hypothesis was somewhat supported: we found that, for avoiders, 87% of species in the guild had the same response to development type as the overall guild; for adapters, 63% had the same response as the overall guild, and for exploiters, only 44% had the same response as the overall guild. Our results indicate that the configuration of suburban developments can have a meaningful impact on bird communities, particularly on those species that are most sensitive to any level of development.
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Acknowledgements
Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. This study was performed under University of Washington animal care and use protocol # 3077-01. Funding was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (DEB-9875041, IGERT-0114351, BCS 0120024, and BCS 0508002) and the University of Washington (Rachel Wood’s Endowed Graduate Program, James W. Ridgeway Professorship). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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DeLap, J.H., Marzluff, J.M. & Converse, S.J. Influence of new residential construction varying in housing density on bird species, human tolerance guilds, and communities.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-54885-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-54885-3
Keywords
- Avian diversity
- Conservation developments
- Human tolerance guilds
- Occupancy
- Planned community developments
- Suburban development
Source: Ecology - nature.com
