An article in the September issue of Ecological Applications asks: “Do birds and beetles show similar responses to urbanization?” The answer: No.

Birds are the go-to animals when it comes to studying the impacts of urbanization, but how well do birds represent other animal groups?

A paper in a 1999 issue of Ecological Applications found that the biodiversity of birds and butterflies correlate well across the urban gradient.

However, this paper, and others, say that beetles respond to different aspects of urbanization than birds do. A 2007 paper in the journal Landscape Ecology reported on a French study of birds, beetles and small mammals and concluded that urban woodlands were an important reservoir of species diversity. Another study conducted in Europe, Canada and Japan, and published in Global Ecology and Biogeography in 2009 found that urbanization itself didn’t have a big impact on ground beetle diversity, but that forest species were lost when the forest was lost.

This is all helpful to know if you are trying to conserve beetles, but also for understanding urban ecology.


Photo: Carabid beetle By Michael K. Oliver, Ph.D. (Photo taken by me) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons