The socioeconomic status of cities covaries with avian life‐history strategies

Abstract

Abstract Cities are the planet's newest ecosystem and thus provide the opportunity to study community formation directly following major permanent environmental change. The human social and built components of environments can vary widely in different cities, yet it is largely unknown how features of cities covary with the traits of colonizing species despite humans being the ultimate cause of environments and disturbances in cities. We constructed a dataset from open‐source data comprised of 13,502 breeding season observations of 213 passerine species observed in 551 Census‐defined urban areas across the United States. We found that as a city became more compact with less sprawl it tended to support more migratory species and species with lower body mass, shorter lifespans, and larger clutches. We also found that species had lower body mass in cities with higher median income, and higher body mass in highly populated cities. Our results highlight the complexity of human‐dominated urban ecosystems, where human socioeconomic actions and everyday activities intermix leading to structurally heterogeneous environments that support the colonization of some species over others.

Keywords

• colonization
• community formation
• ecological selection
• life history
• socioeconomic variation
• urbanization