OOS 4-4 - Equity in access to positive human-bird interactions in urban gardens in San Francisco

As cities across the world expand, people are in danger of losing access to nature and the benefits that it provides. This is especially true for the most marginalized populations, for whom historical and ongoing discrimination has led to living in proximity to less and more-degraded nature. However, although much work has been done on equity in access to greenspace in cities, there has been little focus on other components of urban nature, in particular, biodiversity. In this work, we explored equity in access to positive human-bird interactions in the specific context of urban gardens in San Francisco, CA. We combined social and ecological methods to sample avian communities and people’s attitudes towards birds in the gardens. Using gardens as our unit of analysis, we sampled sites (n=20) along an income gradient. Specifically, we performed 50-m fixed radius point count surveys (n=6/garden) during the hours of peak gardener activity (i.e., 9 am- 4 pm) to identify the species present in the garden, as well as overall avian species richness and abundance that gardeners were likely to encounter. In addition, we surveyed gardeners (n=165) to assess participant’s attitudes towards birds overall, as well as 10 focal species, at the garden sites. We defined access to positive human/bird interactions in our system as the combination of birds being present and abundant and gardeners noticing and having positive attitudes toward them. We quantified gardener attitudes toward individual species via a sentiment analysis and create a species access metric for each garden site combining species abundance, sentiment score, and how often gardeners noticed it.

We found that gardeners had highly positive attitudes toward birds overall. Gardeners frequently noticed birds overall (only 6% rarely or never noticed birds), and 81% wanted to see more birds in their garden. We also found that gardeners had positive attitudes toward most individual species, although slightly more negative than positive attitudes toward two corvid species. Moreover, different individual species differed drastically in how much gardeners noticed them. Our models showed no significant relationship between our metrics of access to nature in the garden—avian abundance, species richness, and our species access metric—and neighborhood income. This may be a result of the fact that the environmental variables that are significantly related to avian abundance and diversity in our models have mixed relationships with or are unrelated to neighborhood income. This indicates that the luxury effect, a relationship between species richness and income, may not exist for birds in community gardens in San Francisco. Our results suggest three main findings: First, gardeners in San Francisco value interacting with birds, and encountering birds in gardens is an important type of nature access. Second, the extent to which gardeners value birds depends on the individual species. Third, positive bird-gardener interactions occur in all gardens, irrespective of their income, suggesting that all groups of people, including marginalized low income communities, are benefiting from human-bird interactions in gardens in the city. Investment in maintaining and growing community gardens could be a win/win solution for biodiversity and equitable nature access in the city.