Timing of dawn chorus in songbirds along an anthropization gradient: a species and community approach

Abstract

The influence of human activities on bird song has been deeply investigated. However, disentangling the relative influence of different anthropogenic pressures (e.g., artificial lights at night, traffic noise, landscape artificialization), of landscape composition (e.g., surface of natural habitat, landscape richness and diversity) and of biotic conditions (bird abundance, richness and diversity) on bird song is still challenging. On the basis of a field survey conducted on a breeding bird community (37 species) in spring 2022 in France, we disentangle the relative influence of such factors of the timing of bird chorus both at the species and community levels. We find that species react differently to the different factors, with species more sensitive to anthropogenic factors and others to biotic conditions. This leads to an important temporal reassembly in the bird chorus at the community level, which promotes a higher temporal turnover in the most anthropized areas and a higher temporal nestedness in the most natural areas. Human activities are thus not only driving temporal changes in different bird species but also promote a change in the temporal structure of the chorus at the whole community.