ArticleNature communications2019
The composition of British bird communities is associated with long-term garden bird feeding.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social information about others' affective states in a human-altered world.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Review
- Review
- Multispecies relations shape bird-feeding practices.npj biodiversity · 2025Article
- Urbanization-induced simplification of isotopic space in birds from a big Neotropical city.Oecologia · 2024Article
- Do human-wildlife interactions predict offspring hiding strategies in peri-urban fallow deer?Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Supplementary feeding of birds during the winter influences measures of avian community structure in yards in a subtropical city.PloS one · 2024Article
- Interactive effects of rising temperatures and urbanisation on birds across different climate zones: A mechanistic perspective.Global change biology · 2023Review
- Temporal avoidance as a means of reducing competition between sympatric species.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Covid-related surge in global wild bird feeding: Implications for biodiversity and human-nature interaction.PloS one · 2023Article
- Avian behaviour changes in response to human activity during the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Hinfluences severe disease-mediated population declines in two of the most common garden bird species in Great Britain.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Drivers of avian habitat use and detection of backyard birds in the Pacific Northwest during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Long-Term Winter Population Trends of Corvids in Relation to Urbanization and Climate at Northern Latitudes.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- No fry zones: How restaurant distribution and abundance influence avian communities in the Phoenix, AZ metropolitan area.PloS one · 2022Article
- Pulses of anthropogenic food availability appear to benefit parents, but compromise nestling growth in urban red-winged starlings.Oecologia · 2021Article
- Reduced ectoparasite load, body mass and blood haemolysis in Eurasian kestrels (Falco tinnunculus) along an urban-rural gradient.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2021Article
- Faecal metabarcoding reveals pervasive long-distance impacts of garden bird feeding.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Nutritional implications of feeding free-living birds in public urban areas.Journal of animal physiology and animal nutrition · 2021Article
- The Biological Deserts Fallacy: Cities in Their Landscapes Contribute More than We Think to Regional Biodiversity.Bioscience · 2021Article
- Urban herring gulls use human behavioural cues to locate food.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
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4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is a multi-billion dollar global industry dedicated to feeding wild birds in residential gardens. This extraordinary boost to food resources is almost certainly reshaping entire bird communities, yet the large-scale, long-term impacts on community ecology remain unknown. Here we reveal a 40-year transformation of the bird communities using garden bird feeders in Britain, and provide evidence to suggest how this may have contributed to national-scale population changes. We find that increases in bird diversity at feeders are associated with increasing community evenness, as species previously rarely observed in gardens have increasingly exploited the growing variety of foods on offer over time. Urban areas of Britain are consequently nurturing growing populations of feeder-using bird species, while the populations of species that do not use feeders remain unchanged. Our findings illustrate the on-going, gross impact people can have on bird community structure across large spatial scales.
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