Can human disturbance promote nestedness? Songbirds and noise in urban parks as a case study

Several explanations have been proposed to understand the existence of nested subset patterns in biological communities, including selective extinction, differential colonization, nested species-habitat relationships, random placement from a common species pool, and human disturbance. We study if songbird assemblages inhabiting urban parks in the Puebla-Cholula Metropolitan Area (Mexico, an urbanizing country) exhibit a nested subset pattern, and apply information-theoretic (IT) methods to rank the likelihood of the abovementioned processes as competing hypotheses explaining nestedness. A total of 21 study sites were considered, where 38 Passeriformes species were retained for nestedness analyses (13 species with preferences for forest habitats, and 25 for non-forest habitats). Neither the number of species per site nor the number of sites per species followed expectations from the random placement hypothesis. In addition, using the NODF index for measuring nestedness and different null models for generating random matrices, we found that songbird assemblages inhabiting urban parks were significantly more nested than expected. The IT approaches we followed evidenced that the two most important ecological processes promoting nestedness were selective extinction and human disturbance: site richness orderly increased according to area, and decreased according to background noise levels. Results are discussed taking into account habitat-related sound degradation and transmission properties, and differential susceptibility to anthropogenic noise among songbirds with preferences for forest versus non-forest habitats. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that noise pollution, a pervasive kind of human disturbance in modern cities, is acknowledged as a factor promoting nestedness in bird communities. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.