Challenges of Urbanization
Most species do not tolerate urbanization, yet a few persist and even thrive in cities. How do these species differ? In collaboration with Paul Martin, we are striving to answer this question, to better understand how birds cope with urban challenges.
You can learn about findings from one of our global, citizen science studies on urban birds here and here.
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We've also tapped into publicly available datasets to generate a novel, quantitative measure of urban tolerance in North American birds. This project was Rachel Fanelli's MSc thesis, which she published in the journal Ecology in 2022.
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Emma Sinclair's MSc project investigated links between hormone concentrations and urban tolerance in birds. You can find her study, published in Proceedings B in 2022, here.
Former MSc student Julianna Petrenko published her undergraduate honours thesis analysis of relationship between Rachel Fanelli's measure of urban tolerance and population trajectories in birds. See her surprising findings here!
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PhD student Paul Preston is analyzing results from the Urban Birds of Ontario project – a citizen science effort to document all the bird species that do and do not breed in Ontario’s 15 metro areas. Stay tuned for exciting findings from this work!
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We launched The Global Urban Bird Survey to better understand urban biodiversity, including in cities in economically disadvantaged regions. So far, our team has completed acoustic surveys in Dakar, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Toronto, with collaborators & community members in each city. We're planning to expand to other cities, and are already analyzing data from our completed surveys.
Current lab members on this project:
Allen Chochinov (PhD candidate), Paul Preston (PhD candidate) & Marlena Warren (PhD student)
CONTACT US
Dr. Fran Bonier, Professor
Queen's University Biology Department
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada
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email:bonierf@queensu.ca
photo credits
Derek Zaraza: Urban peregrine