ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2021
Rapid behavioural response of urban birds to COVID-19 lockdown.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Behavioral convergence under urbanization: An overlooked dimension of biotic homogenization.PLoS biology · 2026Article
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- Article
- Urban birds' tolerance towards humans was largely unaffected by COVID-19 shutdown-induced variation in human presence.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Hyperbolic discounting underpins response curves of mammalian avoidance behaviour.Biology letters · 2024Article
- As human societies urbanize, so does ecology; taxonomic, geographic, and other research trends in urban vertebrate ecology.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- Article
- Species and habitat specific changes in bird activity in an urban environment during Covid 19 lockdown.eLife · 2024Article
- Affectation of COVID-19 pandemic on the use and abundance of wild resources in Tabasco, Mexico: A qualitative assessment.PloS one · 2024Article
- The foraging ecology of yellow-billed and red- billed choughs changed between two climatically different years.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Urban birds become less fearful following COVID-19 reopenings.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Changes in the feeding ecology of an opportunistic predator inhabiting urban environments in response to COVID-19 lockdown.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on house sparrows: Comparative study from an Indian context.PloS one · 2023Article
- Covid-related surge in global wild bird feeding: Implications for biodiversity and human-nature interaction.PloS one · 2023Article
- The effect of decreasing human activity from COVID-19 on the foraging of fallen fruit by omnivores.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Avian behaviour changes in response to human activity during the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Drivers of avian habitat use and detection of backyard birds in the Pacific Northwest during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- COVID-19 lockdown measures impacted citizen science hedgehog observation numbers in Bavaria, Germany.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Phenotypic plasticity of acoustic traits in high-frequency lebinthine crickets (Orthoptera: Eneopterinae: Lebinthina).Die Naturwissenschaften · 2022Article
- Animal-vehicle collisions during the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020 in the Krakow metropolitan region, Poland.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biodiversity is threatened by the growth of urban areas. However, it is still poorly understood how animals can cope with and adapt to these rapid and dramatic transformations of natural environments. The COVID-19 pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to unveil the mechanisms involved in this process. Lockdown measures imposed in most countries are causing an unprecedented reduction of human activities, giving us an experimental setting to assess the effects of our lifestyle on biodiversity. We studied the birds' response to the population lockdown by using more than 126 000 bird records collected by a citizen science project in northeastern Spain. We compared the occurrence and detectability of birds during the spring 2020 lockdown with baseline data from previous years in the same urban areas and dates. We found that birds did not increase their probability of occurrence in urban areas during the lockdown, refuting the hypothesis that nature has recovered its space in human-emptied urban areas. However, we found an increase in bird detectability, especially during early morning, suggesting a rapid change in the birds' daily routines in response to quieter and less crowded cities. Therefore, urban birds show high behavioural plasticity to rapidly adjust to novel environmental conditions, such as those imposed by the COVID-19.
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