Urban landscapes are increasingly required to act as sites of conservation, raising questions regarding how to manage cities to concurrently conserve species and support human well-being. We seek to identify similarities and differences in the habitat preferences of urban humans and birds, thus identifying urban landscape attributes that could be managed to support both species conservation and human well-being. We focus our analysis on Iowa City, Iowa, USA, a small city in an agricultural landscape that typifies urban development in the US Corn Belt. To assess human habitat preferences, we develop a hedonic pricing model using spatial regression techniques to identify the contribution of different environmental features (tree cover; species richness; greenspace; impervious surface; areas, connectivity, and fragmentation of natural land covers) to home sale prices. We use resulting economic values for attributes to indicate habitat preferences of urban homeowners. We then construct habitat occupancy models for a set of urban bird species using field-collected data to identify relationships with environmental attributes similar to those used in hedonic pricing models. We use the resulting models to indicate bird habitat preferences. We compare the identified preferences to assess similarities and differences in the habitat preferences of urban humans and birds.
Results/Conclusions
We find that some aspects of the urban environment (tree canopy, areas of several natural land covers) are positively-valued by humans and positively-related to the occurrence of some species. Other characteristics (impervious surfaces) exhibit negative relationships to both property values and species occurrence. These results suggest that human and bird habitat preferences can overlap and that natural land covers and vegetation could be managed to support both bird conservation and human well-being. However, we find great variation among bird species and notable differences in landscape structure preferences among humans and birds. Thus, the habitat preferences of many bird species differ from human preferences. Managing urban landscapes to simultaneously support a broad array of species and human quality-of-life is thus likely to be challenging.