Urban areas have lower species richness, but maintain functional diversity: insights from the African Bird Atlas Project

High human population growth and rapid urbanisation, particularly in Africa, have led to an increased interest in the impacts of this land-use change on bird communities. The African Bird Atlas Project, where species presence lists are collected in pentads, is a valuable source of data with which to explore the extent of these impacts. Here, for the first-time, we test for differences in species richness patterns across 50 matched pentad pairs from sub-Saharan Africa classified as either urban (or semi-urban) and rural. We found that species richness was lowest in pentads classified as urban (... Mehr ...