Laura Schillé, a former doctoral student intern and upcoming postdoc with the PaqLab, just published an article on her work in the Chair's Urban Observatory. Laura and her team, including Alain Paquette, former PaqLab interns and students, and European collaborators, studied 97 trees across 24 urban plots in Montreal, and found that bird diversity declined with urbanization, while generalist bird species increased. Surprisingly, predation on artificial prey was not linked to bird diversity or urbanization but was positively correlated with tree diversity. These findings highlight the functional importance of tree diversity in supporting avian predation in cities and call for greater attention to intra-urban habitat variability when studying urban ecosystems.

Consult the full article by following the link below.