Recent Publication Feature: Urban tolerance does not protect against population decline in North American birds

Queen’s Biology student Julianna Petrenko, Dr. Frances Bonier, and co-authors published an interesting article earlier this year in Biology Letters. 

In the face of widespread biodiversity loss, understanding why some species might be more vulnerable to decline is important, but not always easy. In this paper, the authors examined the relationship between a species' ability to tolerate urban environments and their population trajectory for over 300 North American bird species. Surprisingly, urban tolerance was unrelated to population trajectory, suggesting that not even species more tolerant of urban environments are better protected from population decline.

This work has also been featured on the Queen’s Gazette - read the Gazette article to find out more!