How do birds utilize and survive in urban spaces? We have worked on questions related to bird collisions with glass, avian use of city parks, and how nesting shorebirds react to people using city beaches.
Sacramento, California's capital city, has grown rapidly over the past few decades, spreading into grassland habitats. We assessed overwintering avian communities across 17 parks in urban and exurban neighborhoods in Sacramento. Total spe- cies richness and abundance at urban and exurban parks was not significantly different, but community assemblages differed significantly.
Avian collision risk in NYC is associated with weather patterns
Katherine Chen worked with NYC Audubon and BirdCast to use a long-term avian collision database, weather data, and avian migration data to understand how important local weather conditions are for predicting avian collision risk in cities.
Beach birds: Monitoring oystercatchers on NYC's beaches
Katie Maffett worked with NYC Audubon to monitor the breeding behavior of nesting American Oystercatchers on the Rockaway Penninsula to understand the effects of different types of human recreation activities.
Urban Ecology In The Heights
As part of the 'Urban Ecology and Environmental Justice In the Heights' summer program run for high school students at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School, we helped to design a monitoring program to detect the effects of restoration efforts on bird communities in 2 parks in upper Manhattan.
Duck Duck Goose
Eric Schertler is spending 2 winters monitoring waterfowl use of ponds and small lakes across an urban--> suburban gradient in the NYC region. It's cold work!
Birds in Aotearoa's cities
We would like to establish urban ecology work in Ōautahi|Christchurch and other cities in Aotearoa|NZ. If you are a student interested in these topics- get in touch!
CityBirds project news
Click on the stories below to read recent news on this topic
