UCLA

Urban biodiversity plays an important role in ecological processes and ecosystem services within cities, making conservation a priority in many municipal sustainability plans. Urban green spaces (UGS) have been a key strategy for conservation by providing habitat for wildlife, including bird communities. While the ecological attributes necessary to enhance the habitability of UGS for bird communities are relatively well known, an understanding of how variation of surrounding urban built form influences avian richness outcomes in these spaces is less understood. As new urban areas continue to develop and UGS become increasingly important habitat areas, urban designers and planners will need a better understanding of the ways in which urban built form patterns influence avian biodiversity outcomes in UGS. To that end, this study investigates this relationship using high resolution land cover data, building LiDAR data, and twenty years of bird occurrence data from the eBird community science program in well-surveyed UGS in Los Angeles, California. Results confirm previous findings that an increase in UGS size is associated with more avian richness. Interestingly, both multivariate regression models, urban form metrics and site-level metrics, performed well in predicting avian richness. Moreover, an increase in the following urban built form metrics, Aggregation Index and Landscape Shape Index, were associated with higher levels of richness, suggesting that more compact and complex shape building patterns support better avian richness outcomes in UGS. These findings contribute to a more complete understanding of how urban built form patterns influence avian biodiversity outcomes and inform urban planning and design of new urban areas aiming to maximize ecological potential for avian biodiversity conservation.