ABSTRACT
There has been a rich history of using birds to study the impacts of urbanization on wildlife communities at both the local and global scale over the last few decades. In this chapter, we review the urban bird community literature to examine trends in its topics across time, frameworks for such studies, and provide suggested areas for future actions to be taken within both the research and management of urban birds. While this field has grown in both its geographic, thematic, and analytical scope, we found that most studies still relied on sampling birds within forested green spaces and along poorly defined urbanization gradients. We suggest that future studies explore trends across broader time scales, utilize refined community ecology metrics, integrate multiple urbanization scores for a gradient, and increase studies of bird communities within urban blue spaces and the urban core. With the persistent growth of this area of study, we hope to continue to add to the wealth of knowledge regarding the management and conservation of urban birds worldwide.
