Just add water: Urban blue spaces increase avian richness and functional diversity

Abstract

Urban blue spaces are highly valuable for both people and nature, providing key ecosystem services, including flood alleviation, pollution absorption, microclimate regulation, benefits to human health and wellbeing, and habitat provision. Crucially, urban blue spaces support biodiversity, including threatened species, and despite often being small, may have disproportionate effects on their surrounding environment, acting as critical habitats within urban systems. However, research on the role of urban blue spaces within ecological contexts remains limited. Here, we assessed urban bird communities across green and blue spaces to quantify the ecological effects of urban water bodies. We surveyed birds along 22 paired 1 km transects in the city of Kingston Upon Hull, UK, recording species and abundance across both winter and breeding seasons. Our findings indicate that blue spaces significantly increase bird species richness during summer (P = 0.016), though not in winter. However, we found that the taxonomic distinctiveness of bird communities is consistently greater around blue spaces across both seasons (P < 0.05). Similarly, functional diversity based on species-level ecological traits was more varied around water (P = 0.01). In addition, we show that urban blue spaces could be important for avian conservation, supporting more red and amber-listed species than green spaces during the summer (P = < 0.05). Overall, our results show that urban blue spaces play a critical ecological role within cities by enhancing the complexity of avian communities, which in turn could improve human wellbeing and contribute to urban sustainability.