COS 46-5 - A deeper understanding of the built environment is needed: A systematic review of how the built environment has been measured in urban avian studies to date
University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California, United States
Abstract: Expansion of urban areas continues to contribute to biodiversity loss around the world, yet they are also important sites of biodiversity conservation. Urban ecologists have been studying urban biodiversity for decades, demonstrating that cities not only support biodiversity, but influence biodiversity in novel ways. In this systematic review, studies of urban avian biodiversity to date are investigated to understand how the built environment has been characterized and measured over time. The purpose of this review is to understand how the built environment has been characterized over time and to identify potential gaps in the way we describe the built environment. This study found that over 60 percent of publications describe the built environment as a homogenous land cover, while green infrastructure was described in greater detail. Of all the publications characterizing the built environment as heterogeneous, 45 percent of them appear in publications in approximately the last 5 years. Nearly 90 percent of publications to date only describe the built environment using two-dimensional metrics. In the last five years, 26 percent of publications have considered three-dimensional metrics. The results of this systematic review indicate that the vast majority of studies use less detailed measures of the urban built environment in comparison to green infrastructure; however, the last five years have shown increased attention in describing the built environment. The implications of this study is that we may be still missing important dynamics by not characterizing the built environment in greater detail in the way we describe green infrastructure.
