Overall, a super fun experience and so lucky to work with my amazing collaborators: @ornithoale.bsky.social who inspired a lot of this work as well as @katherinelauck.bsky.social and Julian Tattoni who TAed the class and helped create this course-based research experience :)

Finally, larger, more attractive species were consistently more likely to be marketed.

This is despite prior work arguing that an emphasis on novel birds translates into dedicated birdwatchers preferring dull species.

Dedicated birdwatchers may value beauty in birds, just like everyone else.

Second, we were surprised that regularly observed species were more likely to be mentioned in trip itineraries.

Maybe tour operators are balancing novelty with the risk of disappointing clients when they inevitably fail to encounter rare species?

Ok, so what did we find?

First, tour operators recognized that birdwatchers value novelty above all else. Range-restricted species were ten times more likely to appear in trip itineraries than cosmopolitan species.

The most unique part: this was a multi-year class project! So fun to have undergrads help us collect the data, form their own questions, present posters, and then, eventually, have it turn into a published product!

(photos are example student posters)

Of course the main purpose of a yard is to attract bugs, and the best way to attract bugs is with native plants, so that’s mostly what we do. Here’s a sampling—descriptions in alt text. 🐝🦋🐛🐜🪰🪲🐞 (Remaining grass lets us play games and lets doggies chase balls, but is slowly going to clover)

It was a pleasure to work with my amazing interdisciplinary team of coauthors: @ornithoale.bsky.social, Maya Xu, @flamingmuffinz.bsky.social, Mei Li Palmeri, Meggie Callahan, Nicole Ardoin, and Gretchen Daily

This underscores the importance of urban community gardens - not only do they provide habitat for biodiversity and opportunities to access nature, but also many other benefits: social connections, education, and food sovereignty. Let’s work to protect and advocate for urban community gardens!

Regardless, these results are exciting - they suggest that community gardens have the potential to provide access to nature across an income gradient! People in both high and low income neighborhoods in San Francisco can have positive interactions with birds in gardens.

Why might this be? It could be because birds are highly mobile organisms, the nature of San Francisco (compact, lots of greenspace, heterogenous), regional effects (luxury effect is stronger in tropical and arid environments), or community gardens themselves.

For example, we expected lower income neighborhoods to have less canopy cover and therefore less avian species richness, but instead found all three of these variables were unrelated!

Instead, we found that avian species richness and abundance were predicted by local and landscape-scale environmental factors, very few of which were correlated with income.

Surprisingly, given past studies on the luxury effect that show higher biodiversity in higher income neighborhoods, we found no relationships between any of these metrics and garden income!

For each garden, we compared three bird metrics with garden income: species richness, abundance, and a species access metric, a metric for our 10 focal species that was higher where there were more individuals from species people noticed and cared about.