CIBIO - Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, Universidade do Porto, Campus Agrário de Vairão, Vairão, 4485-661, Portugal.
Glob Chang Biol. 2014 Mar;20(3):803-10. doi: 10.1111/gcb.12410. Epub 2014 Jan 13.
Urbanization is one of the most extensive and ecologically significant changes happening to terrestrial environments, as it strongly affects the distribution of biodiversity. It is well established that native species richness is reduced in urban and suburban areas, but the species traits that predict tolerance to urbanization are yet little understood. In birds, one of the most studied groups in this respect, evidence is appearing that acoustic traits influence urban living, but it remains unknown how this compares to the effects of more obvious ecological traits that facilitate urban living. Therefore, it remains unclear whether acoustic communication is an important predictor of urban tolerance among species. Here, with a comparative study across 140 European and North American passerines, I show that high song frequency, which is less masked by the low-frequency anthropogenic noise, is associated with urban tolerance, with an effect size over half that of the most important ecological trait studied: off-ground nesting. Other nesting and foraging traits accepted to facilitate urban living did not differ for species occurring in urban environments. Thus, the contribution of acoustic traits for passerine urban tolerance approximates that of more obvious ecological traits. Nonetheless, effect sizes of the biological predictors of urban tolerance were low and the phylogenetic signal for urban tolerance was null, both of which suggest that factors other than phenotypic traits have major effects on urban tolerance. A simple possibility is exposure to urbanization, as there was a higher proportion of urban-tolerant species in Europe, which is more urbanized than North America.
城市化是陆地环境发生的最广泛和最具生态意义的变化之一，因为它强烈影响生物多样性的分布。已经确定，在城市和郊区，本地物种丰富度减少，但预测对城市化的耐受性的物种特征仍知之甚少。在鸟类中，这是在这方面研究最多的群体之一，有证据表明声音特征会影响城市生活，但尚不清楚这与更明显的有利于城市生活的生态特征的影响相比如何。因此，尚不清楚声音交流是否是物种对城市耐受性的重要预测指标。在这里，通过对 140 种欧洲和北美的雀形目鸟类进行比较研究，我表明，高歌声频率（受低频人为噪声掩蔽的程度较低）与城市耐受性相关，其效应大小超过研究的最重要生态特征的一半：离地面筑巢。在城市环境中发生的物种中，其他被认为有利于城市生活的筑巢和觅食特征没有差异。因此，声音特征对雀形目鸟类的城市耐受性的贡献与更明显的生态特征相当。尽管如此，城市耐受性的生物学预测因子的效应大小较低，城市耐受性的系统发育信号为零，这两者都表明，除了表型特征之外，其他因素对城市耐受性有重大影响。一种简单的可能性是暴露于城市化，因为欧洲有更高比例的城市耐受物种，而欧洲比北美城市化程度更高。
