10.5061/DRYAD.QFTTDZ0D6
Wood, Eric
0000-0003-2787-6451
California State University Los Angeles
Esaian, Sevan
University of California, Santa Barbara
Data from: The importance of street trees to urban avifauna
Dryad
dataset
2020
urban trees
Los Angeles
urban birds
National Science Foundation
https://ror.org/021nxhr62
HRD-1602210
2020-04-08T00:00:00Z
2020-04-08T00:00:00Z
en
344430 bytes
2
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Street trees are public resources planted in a municipality’s right-of-way
and are a considerable component of urban forests throughout the world.
Street trees provide numerous benefits to people. However, many
metropolitan areas have a poor understanding of the value of street trees
to wildlife, which presents a gap in our knowledge of conservation in
urban ecosystems. Greater Los Angeles (LA) is a global city harboring one
of the most diverse and extensive urban forests on the planet. The vast
majority of the urban forest is exotic in geographic origin, planted
throughout LA following the influx of irrigated water in the early 1900s.
In addition to its extensive urban forest, LA is home to a high diversity
of birds, which utilize the metropolis throughout the annual cycle. The
cover of the urban forest, and likely street trees, varies dramatically
across a socioeconomic gradient. However, it is unknown how this
variability influences avian communities. To understand the importance of
street trees to urban avifauna, we documented foraging behavior by birds
on native and exotic street trees across a socioeconomic gradient
throughout LA. Affluent communities harbored a unique composition of
street trees, including denser and larger trees than lower-income
communities, which in turn, attracted nearly five times the density of
feeding birds. Foraging birds strongly preferred two native street-tree
species as feeding substrates, the Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia) and
the California Sycamore (Platanus racemosa), and a handful of exotic tree
species, including the Chinese Elm (Ulmus parvifolia), the Carrotwood
(Cupaniopsis anacardioides), and the Southern Live Oak (Quercus
virginiana), in greater proportion than their availability throughout the
cityscape (2-3x their availability). Eighty-three percent of street tree
species (n = 108, total) were used in a lower proportion than their
availability by feeding birds, and nearly all were exotic in origin. Our
findings highlight the positive influence of street trees on urban
avifauna. In particular, our results suggest that improved street-tree
management in lower-income communities would likely positively benefit
birds. Further, our study provides support for the high value of native
street tree species and select exotic species as important habitat for
feeding birds.
(1) Street_tree_bird_foraging_walking_routes_EAP19-0535 --> Google
Earth, kmz file of all 36 walking routes where all street tree and avian
foraging data were collected. The walking routes were delineated into
three categories (low-, medium-, and high-income), based on 2010 census
tract data, from which 36 census tracts were randomly selected. The
walking routes were established in residential neighborhoods with street
trees and a walkway/sidewalk. (2) Street_trees_EAP19-0535 --> 7636
street trees measured along the 36 walking routes. We identified
and measured to dbh of all trees on all routes.
(3) Bird_foraging_EAP19-0535 --> 1546 bird foraging observations
collected on street trees along the 36 walking routes.