Urbanisation isn't good for wildlife, and it gets worse when the temperature rises

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-09-05 01:00

International

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In a warming world, the impact urbanisation has on wildlife living in and around cities could be exacerbated, according to international research. Using hundreds of camera traps spanning 20 North American cities, the researchers gathered data on mammal diversity in each of the cities, comparing how diverse the individual cities were. The researchers say urbanisation was linked to poorer diversity, and this link was stronger in cities that were warmer and had less vegetation throughout. As climate change drives hotter temperatures, the researchers say they are concerned more mammals will struggle to survive in more cities.

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From: Springer Nature

Environment: Heat makes city life harder for native wildlife (N&V)

Changes in climate could worsen the effects of urbanization on native wildlife, a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution suggests. The findings are based on data from camera traps covering 725 sites in 20 North American cities.

Urban areas are expanding in size and population all over the world and can influence the distribution and diversity of wildlife species. There are complex interactions between the characteristics of a city and the animals that live in it. Cities vary in size, human population density, land cover, age of development and climate; wildlife communities vary in species composition and the traits of individual species, including their size, home range and diet. The impact of multiscale environmental changes on wildlife communities is not well understood.

Jeffrey Haight and colleagues used data from 725 camera traps to assess the composition of native mammal communities in cities and the relative occupancy of each species. The camera traps covered 20 cities in North America, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Austin in the USA and Edmonton in Canada. The authors identified 37 native mammal species from the images, including black bears, chipmunks, cougars and white-tailed deer. The authors found that species occupancy and diversity were most negatively related to urbanization in warmer and less-vegetated cities. For example, Sanford, Florida, which has more green vegetation than other cities with a similar temperature, supported a more diverse mammal community than Phoenix, Arizona, which has less vegetation. In general, there was lower species diversity in more-urbanized areas of a city (those with a greater percentage of impervious surface cover), and in more-urbanized cities, and this negative effect was stronger for larger than for smaller mammals.

The authors conclude that regional environmental contexts should be considered when assessing effects of urbanization on local wildlife communities.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Ecology & Evolution

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Arizona State University, USA

Funder: This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation through the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Program grant no. DEB-1832016. Funding for M.F., E.W.L. and S.B.M. was provided by the Abra Prentice-Wilkin Foundation and the EJK Foundation.

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