Scale, birds, and human decisions: a potential for integrative research in urban ecosystems

Although humans are the primary force that change the structure and function of urban ecosystems, to date, few researchers have integrated human processes into an ecological study. With birds in urban environments, the question is how to study the connection between human decisions and their effect on avian populations. One possibility may be to study the linkage between the scales at which humans change urban landscapes and the scales at which birds respond to these changes. In this paper, I describe several integrated research methodologies that would involve ecologists, landscape architects, and social scientists. Organized around three research questions, I suggest several ways that scientists from different disciplines could collaborate to study how humans affect urban bird distributions. The questions are (1) which socio-economic factors affect the abundance and distribution of birds? (2) which landscape designs are preferred by humans and how do these designs impact different bird species? and (3) do estimates of how people rate the quality of an urban community correlate to presence or absence of certain bird species? Such integrated research will likely increase the dialogue among landscape architects and social and natural scientists, leading to novel approaches to study urban ecosystems as a whole.