Rapid behavioural response of urban birds to COVID-19 lockdown

Biodiversity is threatened by the growth of urban areas. However, it is still poorly understood how animals can cope with and adapt to these rapid and dramatic transformations of natural environments. The COVID-19 pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to unveil the mechanisms involved in this process. Lockdown measures imposed in most countries are causing an unprecedented reduction of human activities giving us an experimental setting to assess the effects of our lifestyle on biodiversity. We studied the birds’ response to the population lockdown by using more than 126,000 bird records collected by a citizen science project in northeastern Spain. We compared the occurrence and detectability of birds during the spring 2020 lockdown with baseline data from previous years in the same urban areas and dates. We found that birds did not increase their probability of occurrence in urban areas during the lockdown, refuting the hypothesis that nature has recovered its space in human-em..., On March 14th, 2020, the Spanish Government declared a national emergency due to the COVID-19 outbreak and imposed severe social restrictions. These restrictions included mandatory and permanent confinement of the population, border closure, limitations in public transport, online education, working from home whenever possible, and closure of non-essential business and public services. One day later, we launched the project “#JoEmQuedoACasa” (I stay at home) within the citizen science online platform ornitho (www.ornitho.cat). This platform aims to collect wildlife records in Catalonia from birdwatchers and naturalists to improve knowledge of biodiversity in this region. The project launched during the lockdown aimed to collect information about wildlife responses to the new environmental conditions resulting from people's confinement.
Lockdown surveys were conducted between March 15th and April 13th of 2020. During these four weeks, people were subjected to the most restrictive conditi..., Variables
- spp: species. 6 letter code. Correspondence with scientific names: carcar Carduelis carduelis, chlchl Chloris chloris, colliv Columba livia, colpal Columba palumbus, cyacae Cyanistes caeruleus, larmic Larus michahellis, motalb Motacilla alba, myimon Myiopsitta monachus, parmaj Parus major, pasdom Passer domesticus, phooch Phoenicurus ochruros, picpic Pica pica, serser Serinus serinus, strdec Streptopelia decaocto, stuspp Sturnus spp., turmer Turdus merula.
- pres: 1 = recorded, 0 = not recorded.
- obs_utm: combination of observer identity and 1x1 km UTM cell where the survey was conducted.
- group: survey group. conf = urban lockdown 2020, no_urb_hist= historical non-urban 2015-2019, urb_hist = historical urban 2015-2019.
- time: invested time in the survey (decimal hours).
- hour_std: starting hour of the survey. -1 = sunrise, 0 = noon, 1 = sunset.,