How do Nature-based Solutions influence urban biodiversity? Monitoring the bird community on a university campus and across a medium-sized city

• Grant number: 24/23887-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Ecology - Ecosystems Ecology
• Principal Investigator: João Carlos de Castro Pena
• Grantee: Fabiana dos Santos de Oliveira Rosin
• Host Institution: Centro de Estudos Ambientais (CEA). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 23/17971-0 - Ecological approaches to assess patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem services delivery in urban landscapes, AP.JP

Abstract

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are defined as "actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems, that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits". In a complex socioecological system such as urban landscapes, NbS comprises some of the most effective solutions to allow the expansion, management, and planning of cities to be more sustainable. They can be implemented at different scales and contexts (whole neighborhoods or in a green space), which will determine their influences on the urban ecosystem. In Rio Claro (São Paulo, Brazil), the Araucaria - an initiative from a group of students and researchers from Unesp - is a project that aims at reaching some of the 17 SDG by 2030 by implementing NbS on a university campus. Due to its innovation, Araucaria won first place in the Challenge Campus 2030 that occurred in 2021. After one year of project implementation, several undergraduate students are currently engaged in the application of the Araucaria-related NbS projects, and dozens of trees were already planted over the last months across the Unesp campus in Rio Claro. The goal of this project is to assess the influences of the implementation of Nature-based Solutions on the phylogenetic, functional, and taxonomic compositions of an urban bird community and to compare bird data collected in a university campus with information from a tropical urban settlement that suffers from a poorly managed green infrastructure. Analyses will also consider assessing the influences of landscape characteristics and local environmental conditions of this urban landscape on the urban bird community. We will define 15 sites across the university campus and a 1km² grid across the urban perimeter of Rio Claro and select 15 sites in the intersections of the grid to survey birds across the urban landscape. This approach guarantees that sites in different urban contexts (such as streets and green spaces), will be selected. All these 30 sites will be visited three times during the spring-summer season (between September and November). Bird surveys will occur during the first three hours after sunrise on days with favorable weather. Birds will be identified at their specific level and taxonomic and functional data will be gathered from published literature. We will compare the three dimensions of the bird community between sites across the university. We will also collect local (e.g. moisture and temperature) and landscape (e.g. amount of green cover) characteristics of each site to assess their effects on the bird community. We expect that the bird community of Unesp will be more diverse than the bird community across the urban perimeter of Rio Claro, especially due to the lower green cover. Furthermore, landscape characteristics and local environmental conditions would also determine the phylogenetic, functional, and taxonomic composition of the bird community across the city and on the university campus, being higher in regions with higher proportions of green cover and under lower influence of urbanization impacts, such as higher temperature and noise exposure.