Mason Fidino

Mammal diversity and metacommunity dynamics in urban green spaces: implications for urban wildlife conservation

As urban growth expands and natural environments fragment, it is essential to understand the ecological roles fulfilled by urban green spaces. To evaluate how urban green spaces function as wildlife habitat, we estimated mammal diversity and metacommunity dynamics in city parks, cemeteries, golf courses, and natural areas throughout the greater Chicago, Illinois, USA region. We found similar α-diversity (with the exception of city parks), but remarkably dissimilar communities in different urban green spaces. Additionally, the type of urban green space greatly influenced species colonization and persistence rates. For example, coyotes (Canis latrans) had the highest, but white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) the lowest probability of persistence in golf courses compared to other green space types. Further, most species had a difficult time colonizing city parks even when sites were seemingly available. Our results indicate that urban green spaces contribute different, but collectively important, habitats for maintaining and conserving biodiversity in cities.

Habitat Dynamics of the Virginia Opossum in a Highly Urban Landscape

Abstract As urban habitats vary in composition and structure along the urban to rural gradient, different degrees of urbanization likely result in a diversity of landscape responses from wildlife. We investigated this relationship with the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), an urban adapted species that is both common and understudied in highly metropolitan landscapes. We investigated which landscape factors affect opossum occupancy, colonization, extinction, and detection by using a large system of motion-triggered camera traps in the Chicago metropolitan area over 10 seasons from spring 2010 to summer 2012. Opossum patch occupancy rates were highest near natural water sources regardless of urbanization, whereas occupancy rates in patches ≥1000 m from natural water sources decreased with increasing urbanization. Our results suggest opossums have relaxed habitat needs at intermediate levels of disturbance, as the ability to locate anthropogenic water sources may allow them to occupy previously uninhabitable patches.

Assessing Nest Success of Black-Capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) in an Urban Landscape Using Artificial Cavities

ABSTRACT Native bird diversity is compromised in urban areas partially because of the lack of available habitat for some species. As urbanization continues to increase, it is important to understand the behavioral dynamics of bird species located in cities. The Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus), as a generalist species, offers an opportunity to investigate how common native birds use urban areas that lack natural habitat features while additionally competing with non-native, invasive species (e.g., House Sparrows, Passer domesticus). Our objectives were to determine nest box use and nesting success rate of Black-capped Chickadees and House Sparrows using artificial nest boxes in natural habitats located in an urban area, specifically a recently restored 5.66- ha area of pond sedge surrounded by oak (Quercus spp.) savannah located south of Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Artificial nest cavities with 3 cm diameter entrance holes, intended to exclude House Sparrows, were installed on...

Stillbirth rates across three ape species in accredited American zoos

Stillbirths, or births of infants that died in the womb, represent a failure of the materno‐feto‐placental unit to maintain a suitable fetal environment. Typical studies of nonhuman primate (NHP) stillbirth patterns are primarily descriptive and focus on macaques (genus Macaca). Thus, less is known about other NHP species and rarer still are studies that examine possible biological factors that influence stillbirth rates across taxa. To examine possible contributors to stillbirths in great apes, we analyzed 36 years (1980–2016) of historical data documenting births of zoo‐housed chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, N = 391), western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla, N = 491), and orangutans (Pongo spp, N = 307) in accredited zoological parks in the United States. The average number of births for each of the 446 mothers was 2.7, resulting in a total of 1,189 births with 143 stillbirths (12%). Stillbirths represented 12% of chimpanzee births, 13% of gorilla births, and 10% of orangutan births. We used generalized linear mixed‐effects models to assess possible relationships between stillbirth likelihood and mother origin (wild‐ versus captive‐born), age, and genus. Across taxa, older mothers were more likely to have a stillbirth (p = 0.004). While these results are likely influenced by both biological and management‐related factors (e.g., selective captive breeding), they may be useful to population managers in evaluating pregnancy risks for great apes. Captive settings and archival studbook data such as these may provide a unique opportunity to further explore this topic.

Biodiversity: Making wildlife welcome in urban areas

Careful design of the green spaces in cities will benefit both wild animals and humans.

Assessing online opinions of wildlife through social media

ABSTRACT We present a technique to programmatically collect comments made about videos on YouTube, a popular social media website, and use content analysis to categorize and compare the frequency of comment types across videos and topics. For this article, we collected and categorized the comments of the 10 most viewed videos (in 2013) of three common North American mammals: the coyote (Canis latrans), Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), and raccoon (Procyon lotor) to demonstrate the potential of the technique. Half of the categorized comments for coyote encouraged their lethal control while the most popular comments for raccoon and opossum described these species as “cute” (47% and 34%, respectively). Analyzing YouTube comments is a promising avenue of research, and given proper development, could represent a useful approach to assess public opinions toward wildlife expressed online.

Need for multiscale planning for conservation of urban bats.

For over a century there have been continual efforts to incorporate nature into urban planning. These efforts (i.e., urban reconciliation) aim to manage and create habitats that support biodiversity within cities. Given that species select habitat at different spatial scales, understanding the scale at which urban species respond to their environment is critical to the success of urban reconciliation efforts. We assessed species-habitat relationships for common bat species at 50-m, 500-m, and 1 km spatial scales in the Chicago (U.S.A.) metropolitan area and predicted bat activity across the greater Chicago region. Habitat characteristics across all measured scales were important predictors of silver-haired bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans) and eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis) activity, and big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) activity was significantly lower at urban sites relative to rural sites. Open vegetation had a negative effect on silver-haired bat activity at the 50-m scale but a positive effect at the 500-m scale, indicating potential shifts in the relative importance of some habitat characteristics at different scales. These results demonstrate that localized effects may be constrained by broader spatial patterns. Our findings highlight the importance of considering scale in urban reconciliation efforts and our landscape predictions provide information that can help prioritize urban conservation work.

An assessment of touchscreens for testing primate food preferences and valuations

Typically, animals’ food preferences are tested manually, which can be both time-consuming and vulnerable to experimenter biases. Given the utility of ascertaining animals’ food preferences for research and husbandry protocols, developing a quick, reliable, and flexible paradigm would be valuable for expediting many research protocols. Therefore, we evaluated the efficacy of using a touchscreen interface to test nonhuman primates’ food preferences and valuations, adapting previously validated manual methods. We tested a nonhuman primate subject with four foods (carrot, cucumber, grape, and turnip). Preference testing followed a pairwise forced choice protocol with pairs of food images presented on a touchscreen: The subject was rewarded with whichever food was selected. All six possible pairwise combinations were presented, with 90 trials per pairing. Second, we measured how hard the subject was willing to work to obtain each of the four foods, allowing us to generate demand curves. For this phase, a single image of a food item was presented on the touchscreen that the subject had to select in order to receive the food, and the number of selections required increased following a quarter-log scale, with ten trials per cost level (1, 2, 3, 6, 10, and 18). These methods allowed us to ascertain the subject’s relative preferences and valuations of the four foods. The success of this touchscreen protocol for testing the subject’s food preferences, from both a practical and a theoretical standpoint, suggests that the protocol should be further validated with other foods with this subject, with other subjects, and with other test items.

Trends in Long-Term Urban Bird Research

The vast majority of urban bird research is conducted over relatively short time frames (1–2 years), thereby limiting our ability to understand how temporal processes influence urban bird populations and communities. To further evaluate the importance of and contributions provided by long-term (≥5 years) ecological studies of urban avifauna, we reviewed the published literature for such studies to (1) explore and characterize the focus of long-term urban bird research, (2) identify gaps in our knowledge base, and (3) make suggestions for future research. We identified 85 papers published between 1952 and 2014 for this review. While long-term studies ranged from 5 to 175 years, most were ≤30 years in length. Community-level studies predominately quantified how urbanization affects species richness and composition through time, while population-level studies were primarily on single species of larger body size (≥80 g). Almost every study we reviewed was conducted in North America and Europe, a result that is generally unsurprising as temperate zones and wealthier countries are overrepresented in the literature. Overall, long-term studies provide unique insights into how slow and subtle processes, land-use legacies, time-lagged responses, and complex phenomena influence urban birds. To better encourage the inclusion of long-term studies in urban avian ecology, we suggest that ecologists should (1) keep long-term phenomena in mind when constructing short-term studies, (2) make published datasets accessible, and (3) provide adequate metadata regarding how data was collected.