What is it about?
Bird species inhabiting the urban areas are characterized by lower evolutionary uniqueness than bird species typical from more natural areas. This negative selection impacts on the overall evolutionary heritage of the urban species assemblage, constituting an additional concern to the well recognized issues related to the biotic homogenization.
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Why is it important?
Is important, because even if is well known how the urbanization process replaces specific forms by generalists in space and time, increasing similarity between bird communities (biotic homogenization), our findings provide important additional information focusing the spectrum of effects related to the urbanization process on global biodiversity.
Perspectives
The results of our study demonstrate that urban environments are a factor of concern for maintaining diversity across the tree of life of birds. We hope that adequate urbanization planning could help to alleviate the extreme loss of phylogenetic diversity caused by this process.
Professor Federico Morelli
Czech University of Life Sciences Prague
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evidence of evolutionary homogenization of bird communities in urban environments across Europe, Global Ecology and Biogeography, July 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/geb.12486.
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Resources
Blog about urbanization effects on bird communities
Blog about urbanization effects on bird communities
Homogeneización evolutiva de las comunidades de aves en entornos urbanos
Comments on the topic (in Spanish)
Biotic Homogenization
Interesting description about the main drivers of biotic homogenization
Contributors
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