Urban exploiters have broader dietary niches than urban avoiders

PALACIO, FACUNDO XAVIER

IBIS

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Año: 2019

0019-1019

Urbanization is currently one of the most pervasive threats to biodiversity worldwide,yet traits permitting birds to exploit urban environments are not fully understood. I usedbird traits related to diet (dietary item and foraging stratum), accounting for latitude,body size, development mode and phylogeny, to compare diet breadths of urban exploi-ters and urban avoiders, using a global dataset (463 bird species). Urban exploiters(urban species) were larger, consumed more vertebrates and carrion, and fed more fre-quently on the ground or aerially, and also had broader diets than urban avoiders (non-urban species). In contrast, urban species had narrower foraging strata ranges than non-urban species. These results not only support the hypothesis that urban species sharedietary traits allowing them to cope with urban environments but also highlight theimportance of considering multiple dietary traits to properly quantify species nicheswhen assessing a species? response to environmental change.