71 SE United States cities bird richness

Question: How do components of urban landscape composition and configuration affect urban bird richness and feeding guild diversity?

- species_counts_Americas.csv
Provides species abundance data for 71 cities in the southeastern U.S. Species records were downloaded from GBIF for class Aves and cropped to city boundaries delineated by the CDC's 500 Cities dataset. Records were cleaned by removing those within 1000m of a biodiversity institution ('CoordinateCleaner' R package (Zizka et al. 2019)) and those that do not inhabit North or South America. The first column labeled 'NA' indicates the number of records in each city that were not classified to the species level. See publication code_data prep.Rmd for production of this data.

- species_counts_Americas_diet
Provides the same information as species_counts_Americas, but includes information on feeding guild of each species, which we manually categorized based on information provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon guide of North American birds.

- citydata.csv
Provides data on landscape metrics, bird richness, and feeding guild diversity for 71 cities in the southeast United States. Landscape classification derived from NLCD 2016 land cover data. Landscape metrics calculated using the 'landscapemetrics' R package, and richness/diversity calculated using 'vegan' R package. Data used to model bird richness in 71 cities using different combinations of landscape metrics. (See modeling code in 'publication code_analysis.Rmd')
areamn40=mean forest patch area
areamn90=mean wetland patch area
pland20=% developed land cover
clumpy40=forest clumpiness
clumpy90=wetland clumpiness
edge40=forest edge density
edge90=wetland edge density
contag=contagion
sidi = simpson's diversity
n = # observations
S.rarefy = rarefied species richness
S.rarefy.se = rarefied species richness standard error
div.simpson = simpson's diversity index (for birds)
insectivores.rarefy = rarefied insectivore richness
granivores.rarefy = rarefied granivore richness
carnivore.rarefy = rarefied carnivore richness
omnivore.rarefy = rarefied omnivore richness
aquatic_invertebrates.rarefy = rarefied aquatic invertebrate feeders richness
shannon.functionalDiv = feeding guild diversity (Shannon's diversity index)
PC1 = PCA axis 1
PC2 = PCA axis 2
pland_40 = % forest area

Results: Landscape composition and configuration affect urban bird richness, but forest edge density is the only landscape metric that had a consistently significant negative effect on total rarefied richness, rarefied richness of individual feeding guilds, and feeding guild diversity.