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opencc-zeroJan 2022View details →

Humanization of wildlife gut microbiota in urban environments

Urbanization is rapidly altering Earth's environments, demanding investigations of the impacts on resident wildlife. Here, we show that urban populations of coyotes (Canis latrans) and crested anole lizards (Anolis cristatellus) acquire gut microbiota constituents found in humans, including the gut bacterial lineages most significantly associated with urbanization in humans (e.g., Bacteroides). Comparisons of urban and rural wildlife and human populations revealed significant convergence of the gut microbiota among urban host populations. Remarkably, all microbial lineages found in humans that were overrepresented in urban wildlife relative to rural wildlife were also overrepresented in urban humans relative to rural humans. These results indicate parallel effects of urbanization on human and wildlife gut microbiota and suggest spillover of bacteria from humans into wildlife in cities

opencc-by-4.0Jan 2022View details →

Quantifying the spatial homogeneity of urban road networks via graph neural networks

Publication: Quantifying the spatial homogeneity of urban road networks via graph neural networks, Nature Machine Intelligence, 2022. Publication DOI: 10.1038/s42256-022-00462-y Please refer to https://github.com/jiang719/road-network-predictability.

opencc-by-4.0Jan 2022View details →

Data from the article "Modulation of wintertime canopy Urban Heat Island (CUHI) intensity in Beijing by synoptic weather pattern in planetary boundary layer"

The link includes four datasets, "pcttype" is weather typing data, "pblh" is PBLH data, "uhii-UV" is the mean value of CUHII and wind direction UV of all urban stations, and "uhii-sws" is the value of CUHII, wind speed and wind direction of all urban stations.

opencc-zeroJan 2022View details →

Environmental variability as a predictor of behavioral flexibility in urban environments

Global urbanization processes have highlighted the importance of understanding the effects of urban habitats on animal behavior. Behavioral changes are usually evaluated along an urbanization gradient, comparing urban and rural populations. However, this metric fails to consider heterogeneity between urban habitats that can differ significantly in their characteristics, such as their level of environmental variability. We suggest incorporating dimensions of environmental variability into the urbanization metric. We tested the importance of both level of urbanization and level of urban stability (the rate of anthropogenic changes) on animals' behavioral flexibility by comparing reversal learning abilities in house sparrows from sites differing in the rate of urban development over time. We show that at least for males, urban stability better explains levels of behavioral flexibility than urbanization level. We further show that urban stability corresponds to other behavioral traits such as scrounging behavior and foraging activity. Thus, considering environmental stability and predictability in the form of urban changes can help better understand the mechanisms allowing behavioral changes and adaptations to urban environments. Evaluating the dynamics of the urban built environment could provide a better metric with which to understand urbanization effects on wildlife behavior and an important next step in urban ecology.

opencc-by-4.0Jan 2022View details →

SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence in a Rural and Urban Household Cohort, South Africa, July 2020–September 2021

Early results of the PHIRST-C study seroprevalence results in South Africa

openJan 2022View details →

Dataset used in the assessment of the article "Basic urban services fail to neutralise environmental determinants of 'rattiness', a composite metric of rat abundance"

This data was collected in four Brazilian informal settlements located in the city of Salvador - the third largest city of Brazil - in the wet season of the year 2018. The data includes the collection of three rat abundance metrics - namely, rat marks on track plates, rats caught in live traps and removed, and presence of rat signs (faecal droppings, trails and active burrows) - in a total of 529 independent sampling locations. In addition to the single rat metrics, which were also used to compose the rattiness outcome, the data contain the baseline environmental and socioeconomic (surveyed and mapped) variables and the BUS variables considered in Carvalho-Pereira et al., 2023. (the data will be available soon)

opencc-zeroFeb 2022View details →

Taxonomic and functional homogenization of farmland birds along an urbanization gradient in a tropical megacity

Urbanization is a major driver of land use change and biodiversity decline. While most of the ongoing and future urbanization hot spots are located in the Global South, the impact of urban expansion on agricultural biodiversity and associated functions and services in these regions has widely been neglected. Additionally, most studies assess biodiversity responses at local scale (α-diversity), however, ecosystem functioning is strongly determined by compositional and functional turnover of communities (β-diversity) at regional scales. We investigated taxonomic and functional β-diversity of farmland birds across three seasons on 36 vegetable farms spread along a continuous urbanization gradient in Bangalore, a South Indian megacity. Increasing amount of grey area in the farm surroundings was the dominant driver affecting β-diversity and resulting in taxonomic and functional homogenization of farmland bird communities. Functional diversity losses were higher than expected from species declines (i.e. urbanization acts as an environmental filter), with particular losses of functionally important groups such as insectivores of crop pests. Moreover, urbanization reduced functional redundancy of bird communities, which may further weaken ecosystems resilience to future perturbations. Our study underscores urbanization as a major driver of taxonomic and functional homogenization of species communities in agricultural systems, potentially threatening crucial ecosystem services for food production.

opencc-by-4.0Feb 2022View details →

UGS-1m: Fine-grained urban green space mapping of 34 major cities in China based on the deep learning framework

Urban green space (UGS) is an important component in the urban ecosystem and has great significance to the urban ecological environment. The UGS-1m product provides the fine-grained UGS maps of 34 major cities/areas in China, which is generated based on a deep learning (DL) framework. The DL framework consists of a generator and a discriminator. The generator is a fully convolutional network designed for UGS extraction (UGSNet), which integrates attention mechanisms to improve the discrimination to UGS, and employs a point rending strategy for edge recovery. The discriminator is a fully connected network aiming to deal with the domain shift between images. To support the model training, an urban green space dataset (UGSet) with a total number of 4,454 samples of size 512×512 is provided. Code for the UGSet and the UGSet will be soon available at:  https://github.com/liumency/UGS-1m.  The main steps to obtain UGS-1m can be summarized as follows: a) Firstly, the UGSNet will be pre-trained on the UGSet in order to get a good starting training point for the generator; b) After pre-training on the UGSet, the discriminator is responsible to adapt the pre-trained UGSNet to different cities/areas through adversarial training; c) Finally, the UGS results of the 34 major cities/areas in China (UGS-1m) are obtained using 2,343 Google Earth images with a data frame of 7'30" in longitude and 5'00" in latitude, and a spatial resolution of nearly 1.1 meters. Evaluating the performance of the proposed approach on samples from Guangzhou city shows the validity of the UGS-1m products, with an overall accuracy of 87.4% and an F1 score of 81.14%.

opencc-by-4.0Feb 2022View details →

Data for: Impacts of urbanization on chloride and stream invertebrates: a 10-year citizen science field study of road salt in stormwater runoff

Abstract: The use of deicing agents during the winter months is one of many stressors that impact stream ecosystems in urban and urbanizing watersheds. In this study, a long-term dataset collected by citizen scientists with the Missouri Stream Team was used to evaluate the relationships between watershed urbanization metrics and chloride metrics. Further, these data were used to explore effects of elevated chloride concentrations on stream invertebrate communities using quantile regression. While the amount of road surface in a watershed was a dominant factor in predicting the maximum chloride measurement, the median chloride concentration was also strongly related to the amount of medium-to-high density development in the watershed, suggesting that non-municipal salt use is an important contributor to increases in baseflow chloride concentrations. Additionally, chloride concentration appears to be one of the many factors that impact invertebrate density and diversity measurements, with decreases in invertebrate diversity corresponding with the U.S. EPA water quality criteria. Our findings suggest that the use of chloride-based road salt on municipal roads as well as in non-municipal settings is contributing to a loss of diversity and density of aquatic invertebrate communities in urban regions.

opencc-zeroFeb 2022View details →

Data on monitoring the formation of chemical cocktails in urban streams in response to Freshwater Salinization Syndrome

Data include the concentration of base cations and nutrients over time and over space in urban streams near the University of Maryland campus in College Park, Maryland, USA. Data were collected longitudinally along streams and over 24-hour time periods. Data on the retention and release of base cations and trace elements were also collected through incubation experiments.

opencc-zeroMar 2022View details →

Differences in feather structure between urban and forest great tits – constraint or adaptation?

Urbanization is one of the strongest habitat transforming processes today that has resulted in changes in the ecological conditions for wild populations. In birds, the limitation of natural food sources and a warmer microclimate in cities can potentially influence the development and functioning of the plumage that may have important fitness consequences. Despite its potential significance, the plumage structure of urban birds are largely unexplored and it is unclear whether and how they respond to urban ecological processes such as different constraints and selection pressures. In this study, we compared several structural properties of contour, primary and tail feathers between two forest and two urban great tit (Parus major) populations. Our results show that the urban environment affects only a few structural properties of feathers and only in the plumage of first-year birds. We found that both the plumulaceous and the pennaceous parts of their contour feathers are longer and have lower barb density in the urban than in the forest habitat. We also found that the primaries of first-year birds have narrower rachis and higher barbule density in the cities than in the forests, but there were no differences in other wing feather traits and in any tail feather traits between habitats. We did not find differences in the feather structure of urban versus forest adult birds. The habitat differences in first-year birds may indicate nutritional constraints or the effects of the warmer microclimate of the urban environment. These differences seem to disappear completely in adulthood that can be explained by the selective mortality of first-year birds, or by adults being less sensitive than first-year birds to environmental effects during their molt.

opencc-zeroMar 2022View details →

Exposure to urban heavy metal contamination diminishes bumble bee colony growth

As a result of their industrial past, legacy cites often have elevated concentrations of soil heavy metal contamination. Metal pollution can have negative and prolonged ecosystem impacts, and bees that forage in these urban ecosystems are at risk of exposure. Legacy cities are known to support species rich bee communities, which highlights the importance of determining the impact of heavy metal contamination on wild bee health. We examined how oral exposure to concentrations of four metals found within the provisions of bees foraging within Cleveland, Ohio, USA influenced colony growth of Bombus impatiens Cresson (Hymenoptera: Apidae), a common species within legacy cities across the eastern United States. Colony weight and brood survivorship were compared among hives fed uncontaminated sucrose solution (hereafter nectar), nectar spiked with one metal (arsenic, cadmium, chromium, or lead), and nectar containing all metals, after 15 or 30 d of exposure within flight tents. Across both exposure periods, we found a significantly higher proportion of dead brood in metal exposed hives. Additionally, colonies fed all four metals had a significantly higher proportion of dead brood than those fed a single metal. Our findings illustrate that even low, environmentally relevant concentrations of metals collected by B. impatiens in legacy cities can negatively influence bee colony growth. We highlight the need to identify metal exposure routes for bees in contaminated landscapes to minimize risk and bolster conservation habitat initiative success.

openother-ncMar 2022View details →

TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes 2022 Mobile, Development dataset

TAU Urban Acoustic Scenes 2022 Mobile development dataset consists of 1-seconds audio segments from 10 acoustic scenes: <ul> <li>Airport - airport</li> <li>Indoor shopping mall - shopping_mall</li> <li>Metro station - metro_station</li> <li>Pedestrian street - street_pedestrian</li> <li>Public square - public_square</li> <li>Street with medium level of traffic - street_traffic</li> <li>Traveling by a tram - tram</li> <li>Traveling by a bus - bus</li> <li>Traveling by an underground metro - metro</li> <li>Urban park - park</li> </ul> The dataset contains in total 64 hours of audio.

opencc-zeroMar 2022View details →

Mammals adjust diel activity across gradients of urbanization

Time is a fundamental component of ecological processes. How animal behavior changes over time has been explored through well-known ecological theories like niche partitioning and predator-prey dynamics. Yet, changes in animal behavior within the shorter 24-hour light-dark cycle have largely gone unstudied. Understanding if an animal can adjust their temporal activity to mitigate or adapt to environmental change has become a recent topic of discussion and is important for effective wildlife management and conservation. While spatial habitat is a fundamental consideration in wildlife management and conservation, temporal habitat is often ignored. We formulated a temporal resource selection model to quantify the diel behavior of eight mammal species across ten U.S. cities. We found high variability in diel activity patterns within and among species and species-specific correlations between diel activity and human population density, impervious land cover, available greenspace, vegetation cover, and mean daily temperature. We also found that some species may modulate temporal behaviors to manage both natural and anthropogenic risks. Our results highlight the complexity with which temporal activity patterns interact with local environmental characteristics, and suggest that urban mammals may use time along the 24-hour cycle to reduce risk, adapt, and therefore persist in human-dominated ecosystems.

Fig. 8 in Distribution Of The Carabid Species (Coleoptera, Carabidae) In Woodlands Of The Protected And Urban Areas (North Of Ukraine)

Fig. 8. The ratios of forest carabid species according to their geographical ranges in the studied territories. Codes of geographical range given in table 2.

Fig. 7 in Distribution Of The Carabid Species (Coleoptera, Carabidae) In Woodlands Of The Protected And Urban Areas (North Of Ukraine)

Fig. 7. Average of activity density (± 95 %CI) of the five abundant forest species in the Polisky Nature Reserve and in the urban parks.

Fig. 4 in Distribution Of The Carabid Species (Coleoptera, Carabidae) In Woodlands Of The Protected And Urban Areas (North Of Ukraine)

Fig. 4. The ordination (non-metric multidimensional scaling using the Bray-Curtis index similarity and the square root transform method) of the total species compositions in the forests of the Polisky Nature Reserve and the urban parks during the study years. The stress of the two-dimensional configuration is 4 %. Site name abbreviations are the same as in fig. 3.

Fig. 3 in Distribution Of The Carabid Species (Coleoptera, Carabidae) In Woodlands Of The Protected And Urban Areas (North Of Ukraine)

Fig. 3. Cluster analysis of Bray-Curtis similarity measure and the group average linkage method of carabid assemblages in the studied areas. Site name abbreviations: R ― Polisky Nature Reserve, T ― Teremky and F ― Theofania urban parks; the numbers after the letter are indicate the study year.

Fig. 6 in Distribution Of The Carabid Species (Coleoptera, Carabidae) In Woodlands Of The Protected And Urban Areas (North Of Ukraine)

Fig. 6. Plot ordination of detrending correspondent analysis (66 % of the variance) of the forest species compositions in forests of the Nature Reserve and the urban parks during the study years. Symbols represent: plus — species which found only in parks, cross — species which found only in Reserve and column — shared species in both territories. Site name abbreviations are the same as in fig. 3.

Fig. 5 in Distribution Of The Carabid Species (Coleoptera, Carabidae) In Woodlands Of The Protected And Urban Areas (North Of Ukraine)

Fig. 5. Plots of the distribution of carabids species (A) and their density (B) according to dispersal ability (B — brachypterous, D — dimorphic, M — macropterous) in three habitat affinity groups in the Polisky Nature Reserve and in the urban parks.