Ian MacGregor-Fors

• PhD in Ecology
• Professor of Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University of Helsinki

Urbanization is considered one of the most critical processes related to biodiversity loss worldwide. Birds are one of the most commonly studied groups in urban ecosystems due to their quick response to environmental changes. Despite the current knowledge related to urban bird communities, information associated with the specific factors shaping av...

All cities are home to birds, which, through their activities, can either enhance or detract from human well‐being. To identify such interactions, we synthesize current understanding of bird‐mediated ecosystem services and disservices in cities. We find widespread evidence that birds provide cultural services, but the link between urban bird divers...

Urbanization is a prominent driver of environmental change worldwide, profoundly impacting biodiversity dynamics. While much research has originated from large urban areas in temperate regions, medium-sized boreal cities remain relatively understudied. By following a citywide survey approach, we studied the impact of urbanization intensity gradient...

The influx of international debris, especially plastic, has emerged as a significant environmental challenge for coastal ecosystems. Our study on Cozumel Island (Mexico) investigated the origin and distribution of plastic debris across nine beaches, considering factors such as wind patterns and ocean currents. Results revealed that over 90% of the...

The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) is one of the most widespread invasive bird species, with numerous and dense populations established across urban-agricultural landscapes of North America. Although this species has been widely studied to identify the traits that explain its global ubiquity, descriptions of house sparrow acoustic features acros...

The spatial configuration and management of agricultural and other land-use practices can affect ecological assemblages, but how resident and migratory species respond to land uses is not well known, hindering our understanding of the effects of land use on biodiversity. Here, we compare alpha and beta diversity and ecosystem functioning for reside...

In the current debate on academic publishing, the roles of editors and reviewers are under scrutiny. To capture views on these roles, assess discrepancies between their perceived and desired functions, and gauge acceptance of the peer-review process, we conducted a survey, yielding 569 responses from 70 countries. Our findings reveal two key insigh...

Urbanization influences the social dynamics of periurban settlements, altering the sense of belonging among residents in areas conurbed by expanding cities. However, the role of the conurbing decade and settlement type in this process remains largely unexplored within the Latin American context. In this study, we analyzed the urban expansion and re...

Native habitat conversion to urban and agricultural areas represents conservation concerns for habitat quality and the breeding success of birds. In tropical areas facing regular deforestation of at-risk habitats, changes may occur to bird and nest predator communities that influence contradictory trends in breeding success. To assess the value of...

The hierarchical clustering of communities based on species' compositional similarity (and abundance or frequency) is standard in community ecology to unveil large-scale patterns and underlay environmental causes of differentiation among communities. Often, the threshold to discretize clusters is arbitrary despite the existence of methods that mini...

Most plant-bird interaction research employing complex ecological networks focuses on pollination and seed dispersal interactions. However, birds and plants are immersed in a great variety and complexity of direct and indirect relationships. Therefore, the use of multilayer networks (i.e., species interaction networks involving different types of i...

Background Urban trees are the most conspicuous elements of greenery in cities, providing goods and services that contribute to people’s well-being. However, proper tree care and management are necessary for their survival, particularly for street and residential trees. Methods Through a survey, our objectives were to identify and quantify the pre...

Birds are the best-known taxonomic group worldwide, and the Neotropics is home to the most considerable avian diversity. However, there is still a dearth of information on the parasites affecting most avian species. If we do not know what parasites infect birds, we will not be able to determine risks for humans and domestic and wild birds, nor to a...

Although much attention has been paid to improve the representation of the urban spatial complexity, most efforts have been limited to the inclusion of green cover data to describe the biological component of cities, leaving the measurement of crucial urban ecological properties out of the picture. To tackle this, the Urban Ecosystem Integrity Inde...

The biodiversity impacts of agricultural deforestation vary widely across regions. Previous efforts to explain this variation have focused exclusively on the landscape features and management regimes of agricultural systems, neglecting the potentially critical role of ecological filtering in shaping deforestation tolerance of extant species assembl...

Ecological conditions are heavily influenced by human–environment interactions, which is why understanding the relationships between people and nature is crucial. While earlier studies have indicated a pattern of positive correlations between economic wealth and biodiversity in urban areas, there are some examples that suggest that such association...

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many people around the world stayed home, drastically altering human activity in cities. This exceptional moment provided researchers the opportunity to test how urban animals respond to human disturbance, in some cases testing fundamental questions on the mechanistic impact of urban behaviours on animal behaviour....

There has been a rich history of using birds to study the impacts of urbanization on wildlife communities at both the local and global scale over the last few decades. In this chapter, we review the urban bird community literature to examine trends in its topics across time, frameworks for such studies, and provide suggested areas for future action...

Cities can host significant biological diversity. Yet, urbanisation leads to the loss of habitats, species, and functional groups. Understanding how multiple taxa respond to urbanisation globally is essential to promote and conserve biodiversity in cities. Using a dataset encompassing six terrestrial faunal taxa (amphibians, bats, bees, birds, cara...

The urbanization process leads to changes in bird communities’ taxonomic and functional compositions. Highly urbanized areas generally exhibit a reduced number of bird species sharing few functional traits. However, most urban bird studies focused on vegetation patches in temperate cities. In this study, we investigate how urban environmental attri...

Unintentional food resources in urban areas (street litter, food leftovers, overflowing trash bins) are dietary components of some urban-exploiter bird species. In this study, we report on 13 bird species in six southern Finnish cities using urban trash bins and describe differences in their activity when provided with food resources (i.e., bait) i...

The Neotropical region is undergoing high levels of urban expansion and harbors the greatest diversity of vascular epiphytes globally. In cities, it could be expected that the density of woody vegetation positively predicts epiphyte communities by providing substrate, resources for pollinators, and buffering microclimatic conditions. However, there...

A recurrent behavioral trait model to study adaptation to urban environments is the flight initiation distance (FID), measured as the distance at which animals flee from an approaching threat. It has previously been shown that urban birds display shorter FID than their non-urban (rural) counterparts. However, discerning whether this is the result o...

Forested periurban areas represent a major asset for conservation as these sites could potentially mitigate the effects of landscape modification. Nevertheless, these forests face unsupervised management, affecting availability of resources such as tree cavities used by cavity-nesting vertebrates. We evaluated the ecological importance of snags for...

A major barrier to advancing ornithology is the systemic exclusion of professionals from the Global South. A recent special feature, Advances in Neotropical Ornithology, and a shortfalls analysis therein, unintentionally followed a long-standing pattern of highlighting individuals, knowledge, and views from the Global North, while largely omitting...

Many bird species with behavioural plasticity innovate when searching for alternative trophic resources, mainly during periods of energetic constraints, when colonizing new habitats, or during the breeding season when the demand for protein is higher. For example, the consumption of meat by non-carnivorous bird species has been anecdotally document...

The escape behaviour, measured as flight initiation distance (FID; the distance at which individuals take flight when approached by a potential predator, usually a human in the study systems), is a measure widely used to study fearfulness and risk-taking in animals. Previous studies have shown significant differences in the escape behaviour of bird...

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many people around the world stayed home, drastically altering human activity in cities. This exceptional moment provided researchers the opportunity to test how urban animals respond to human disturbance, in some cases testing fundamental questions on the mechanistic impact of urban behaviors on animal behavior. Ho...

Research on urban biodiversity has primarily addressed the effects of urbanization and human activity synergistically as it has been virtually impossible to dissociate their impact on city wildlife. However, the anthropause resulting from COVID–19 lockdowns provided an unprecedented scenario to study the relative role of human activity on avian com...

Urbanization represents a multi-dimensional ecological ‘filter’ for birds determined by a myriad of variables that can change over time. Birds colonising an urban system or staying in a habitat that has been recently urbanised need to overcome both the extrinsic (e.g. food predictability, human activities, and inter-specific interaction) and intrin...

Planning, implementing, and systematic revision of conservation policies are necessary to protect the biodiversity of a territory. This is critical in countries heavily impacted by anthropogenic activities, like El Salvador, where conserving biodiversity remnants must be a priority. Monitoring indicator groups represents a feasible option to review...

Esta nota reporta el primer registro de urraca-hermosa cara negra (Calocitta colliei) en el municipio de Tecomán, Colima, México, y la ampliación de su área de distribución 22 kilómetros hacia el sur.

Se analizan registros de codorniz rayada (Philortyx fasciatus) en localidades ubicadas fuera del polígono propuesto para la especie por Howell y Webb (1995). Se establece con mayor precisión el área de distribución de esta especie endémica del occidente de México.

Since the 1990s, recognition of urban biodiversity research has increased steadily. Knowledge of how ecological communities respond to urban pressures can assist in addressing global questions related to biodiversity. To assess the state of this research field in meeting this aim, we conducted a systematic review of the urban biodiversity literatur...

Parque Bicentenario in the Área Natural Protegida El Espino-Bosque Los Pericos, considered the “last green lung of San Salvador”, is the most important forested area in central El Salvador. We performed a survey to provide the first inventory of scarab beetles (Scarabaeidae) of the park. Collections were conducted monthly for one year (August 2018–...

Urban areas are particularly vulnerable to climate change due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, which can be mitigated by urban vegetation through shading and evapotranspiration. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of spatially explicit information on the cooling capacity of green infrastructure for most Latin American cities. In this study, w...

Behavior provides a useful framework for understanding specialization, with animal personality aiding our understanding of the invasiveness of birds. Invasions imply dispersion into unknown areas and could require changes in behavior or spatial clustering based on personality. Reduced neophobia and increased exploring behavior could allow individua...

β-diversity has been under continuous debate, with a current need to better understand the way in which a new wave of measures work. We assessed the results of 12 incidence-based β-diversity indices. Our results of gradual species composition overlap between paired assemblages considering progressive differences in species richness show that: (i) f...

A major barrier to advancing ornithology is the systemic exclusion of professionals from the Global South. A recent special dossier, Advances in Neotropical Ornithology, and a shortfalls analysis therein, unintentionally followed a long-standing pattern of highlighting individuals, knowledge, and views from the Global North, while largely omitting...

Urban ecosystems are evolutionarily recent novel environments acting as biodiversity filters. Psittacidae birds are considered successful urban adapters mainly due to their generalist feeding and opportunistic behavior, allowing them to occupy environments from cold temperate to dry xeric areas. Therefore, it is important to understand how these sp...

The Eurasian Collared-Dove ( Streptopelia decaocto ) is one of the most successful invasive bird species across the world. Worryingly, the invasive dove is a known reservoir of many diseases, some of which can potentially infect mammals (including human beings). Additionally, aggressive behaviors have been recorded toward other bird species resulti...

Information on how urban areas affect bird communities during winter in the boreal region is still scarce. With the aim of assessing such role of the urban habitats on over-wintering boreal birds, I focused on a city-wide approach in the city of Lahti (southern Finland) and two nearby forests (as controls). Point count surveys were conducted in 157...

Caribbean islands are important hotspots for endemic species, concentrating high biodiversity on exceptionally small areas. Cozumel Island is not an exception, yet little published information exists on its bird diversity. In this study, we assessed the contribution of each major ecosystem of Cozumel Island (i.e., tropical forest, mangrove, palm th...

To tackle urban heterogeneity and complexity, several indices have been proposed, commonly aiming to provide information for decision-makers. In this study, we propose a novel and customizable procedure for quantifying urban ecosystem integrity. Based on a citywide approach, we developed an easy-to-use index that contrasts physical and biological v...

The COVID-19 lockdowns set a singular opportunity to perform scientific research in idle cities. The expected changes in urban ecology led us to conform a community composed of several volunteers which, following standardized protocols, conducted structured bird surveys across Colombia. We describe the process and experience of this initiative, con...

Cambios en la actividad nocturna de las aves durante el confinamiento decretado con motivo de la pandemia de la enfermedad por coronavirus (COVID–19) en una ciudad neotropical El confinamiento decretado con motivo de la pandemia por COVID–19 ofreció la oportunidad de medir la biodiversidad de especies en ambientes urbanos en condiciones diferentes...

The cultivation of cocoa is a commodity of great importance worldwide. In Mexico, cocoa is grown in Tabasco and Chiapas states in agroforestry systems since pre-Hispanic times, where cocoa is grown under the canopy of shade trees. Crops such as sugarcane and extensive livestock production have gradually reduced the area devoted to cocoa cultivation...

Renewable ocean energy is an alternative that will help reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. However, there is uncertainty about potential environmental impacts of the technologies involved, because these are new and untested, and methods for the evaluation and monitoring of environmental impacts are scarce. We performed a systematic litera...

Intensification of urbanization has been shown to be associated with taxonomic and functional modifications of biological communities, leading to changes in trophic interactions. These changes may reduce the delivery of ecosystem services provided by urban ecosystems. For instance, predation on herbivorous insects is an important ecological process...

Agriculture affects biodiversity on a global scale and especially in the Neotropics, leading to land-management challenges in which native wildlife is forced to interact with high-contrast landscape matrices. Further, the direct and indirect effects of hurricanes impacting native habitat in human-modified landscapes increases reliance on agricultur...

Biological invasions occur when individuals of alien species establish and colonize new locations. The House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is one of the most widespread invasive birds, native to Eurasia and North Africa, and has successfully invaded many regions from across the world. The House Sparrow was successfully introduced in 1852 into North A...

Cities do not only represent noisy systems, but also limit acoustic communication given the complex array of artificial structures through which signals can be trapped or obscured. In this study we performed a field experiment to evaluate the loss of energy of a standardized acoustic emission (generated with notes and a call of the Clay-colored Thr...

The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundr...

For being a relatively small island, of approximately 480 km2, Cozumel receives particular national and international attention for the coral reefs to which it is related, which are part of the Great Mesoamerican Barrier Reef. Due to its ecological importance, in 1996 the Arrecifes de Cozumel National Park was decreed in order to protect these uniq...

Urbanization drives changes in acoustic communication systems in some animal species. Noise and light pollution are among the main urban factors known to disrupt the timing and structure of avian singing behaviour. Despite our understanding of the ways in which urbanization can drive variations in avian acoustic communication, our ability to genera...

With the establishment and expansion of urban areas, many plants are lost, while some are gained. Understanding plant species richness and composition in cities, including planted elements along streetscapes, is a priority for urban vegetation management and biodiversity conservation. In this study, we assessed the compositional dissimilarity of st...

Urban environments around the world are the result of their evolutionary and geographic history, and more contemporary influences of the social, cultural, economic, political and technical systems that shaped their construction. In this chapter, we use urban filters as the overarching framework within which specific aspects pertaining to the histor...

During the last decades, urbanization has been highlighted as one of the main causes of biodiversity loss worldwide. Among organisms commonly associated with urban environments, ants occupy urbanized green areas and can live both inside and around human settlements. However, despite the increasing number of studies on the ecological dynamics of ant...

Bird‐window collisions have been estimated to be among the most important sources of bird death. Despite increasing knowledge in Latin America, our understanding of this phenomenon is still incipient, with research performed in Mexico limited to a handful of studies. Here, we present the results of a citizen science effort focused on bird‐window co...

In Mexico, the CEMIE-Océano (Mexican Center for Ocean Energy Innovation) is exploring potential locations for marine energy production while assessing social perception and protecting the environment. The goals of this study were to: a) calculate potential renewable energy production in the north of the Yucatan Peninsula; b) understand the percepti...

In 2020, a small urban center from southern Finland, the City of Lahti, was awarded the 2021 European Green Capital, which recognizes and rewards local efforts that seek to improve the urban environment, together with its economy and the quality of life for its inhabitants, further posing ambitious goals for ecological improvement. In this commenta...

In this study we focused on urban bird diversity across Mexico, a megadiverse country, with a special focus on the relative role of urban greenspaces and heavily-built sites. We considered a country-wide approach, including 24 different sized Mexican cities. Our aims were to describe the urban bird diversity in focal cities and further assess the r...

Technology is transforming societies worldwide. A major innovation is the emergence of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS), which have the potential to revolutionize cities for both people and nature. Nonetheless, the opportunities and challenges associated with RAS for urban ecosystems have yet to be considered systematically. Here, we report th...

Technology is transforming societies worldwide. A major innovation is the emergence of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS), which have the potential to revolutionize cities for both people and nature. Nonetheless, the opportunities and challenges associated with RAS for urban ecosystems have yet to be considered systematically. Here, we report th...

Rapid urbanization and the global loss of biodiversity necessitate the development of a research agenda that addresses knowledge gaps in urban ecology that will inform policy, management, and conservation. To advance this goal, we present six topics to pursue in urban biodiversity research: the socioeconomic and social-ecological drivers of biodive...

The magnitude of both direct and indirect anthropogenic disturbances has altered all ecosystems across the globe. Human actions have triggered such extensive environmental consequences that an era has been coined to encompass them: the Anthropocene. This myriad of shifts has been abstracted in a unifying “global change” concept. Among the most worr...

Damage to maize (Zea mays) fields leads to negative attitudes towards wildlife that can affect conservation. In a Biosphere Reserve in central Mexico, local inhabitants perceive that wildlife causes major damage to maize fields. Therefore, we quantified maize damaged by wildlife species and by wind, and we explored whether this was related to the p...

Urbanization has been identified as one of the major causes of species endangerment. Albeit important efforts by urban ecologists, there are still understudied regions in the globe with an important bias toward bird studies. Fortunately, studies from biodiversity-rich regions are increasingly growing; yet, with few exceptions, most evidence-based s...

Urbanization has been recognized as one of the most widespread threats to biodiversity. However, the response of wildlife to urbanization differs among groups, with many species being able to persist, adapt, and even thrive in these novel ecosystems. With the aim of assessing the response of avian communities in a neotropical green city, we evaluat...

Background Among urban stimuli, anthropogenic noise has been identified to be one of the behavioral drivers of species that rely on acoustic signals for communication. Studies have shown both species-specific and assemblage responses to urban noise, ranging from the modulation of their acoustic frequencies and spatiotemporal adjustments to declines...

Biological invasions are the second most important cause of species extinction. Aided by processes such as transportation and urbanization, exotic species can establish and spread to new locations, causing changes in the function and structure of ecosystems. The House Sparrow is a widespread and highly abundant landbird associated to human presence...

In semi-arid environments, the marked contrast in temperature and precipitation over the year strongly shapes ecological communities. The composition of species and their ecological interactions within a community may vary greatly over time. Although intra-annual variations are often studied, empirical information on how plant–bird relationships ar...

Behavioral plasticity can drive feeding innovations, a frequent trait of urban exploiter species. The House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is a widespread and abundant urban dweller whose success has often been related to its dietary breadth. Although both formal and informal sources (e.g., internet videos, news, and blogs) have shown meat scavenging...

Birds invest time and resources in escape behaviors, thus changing their foraging strategies, habitat selection, and even reproduction. Flight initiation distance (FID) and the distance at which birds detect a threat, alert distance (AD), have been used as indicators of the ability of birds to detect potential predators. In this study we compared t...

Background: Cities differ from non-urban environments by the intensity, scale, and extent of anthropogenic pressures, which can drive the occurrence, physiology, and behavior of the organisms thriving in these settings. Traits as green cover often predict the occurrence patterns of bird species in urban areas. Yet, anthropogenic noise and artificia...

Recently, a wide array of epidemiological models have been developed to guide public health actors in containing the rapid dissemination of the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), cause of COVID-19. Despite their usefulness, many epidemiological models recently developed to understand the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and infec...

A team of 79 scientists from more than 50 institutions partnered to gather all available information regarding Mexican ants since 1894, the year in which the first geographical record of an ant is known for the country. In this new study, including more than 21,000 records, we showed that there are ~900 species of ants in Mexico, which are distribu...

A team of 79 scientists from more than 50 institutions partnered to gather all available information regarding Mexican ants since 1894, the year in which the first geographical record of an ant is known for the country. In this new study, including more than 21,000 records, we showed that there are ~900 species of ants in Mexico, which are distribu...

A team of 79 scientists from more than 50 institutions partnered to gather all available information regarding Mexican ants since 1894, the year in which the first geographical record of an ant is known for the country. In this new study, including more than 21,000 records, we showed that there are ~900 species of ants in Mexico, which are distribu...

Mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, with an important proportion of endemism mainly because of the convergence of the Nearctic and Neotropical biogeographic regions, which generate great diversity and species turnover at different spatial scales. However, most of our knowledge of the Mexican ant biota is limited to a few we...

There is no current agreement on the definition of 'rural'. • We performed a global survey on the academic conception of 'rural'. • Results show no clear consensus, not even in the components of its definition. • Conception of 'rural' is related with respondent origin, rather than area of expertise. • We suggest a framework that encompasses all soc...

Las ciudades albergan a más de la mitad de la población del mundo y están relacionadas con cuatro de los componentes más importantes del cambio global (cambio de uso del suelo, alteración de ciclos biogeoquímicos, introducción de especies exóticas y con potencial invasor, cambio climático), por lo que representan una amenaza para la biodiversidad y...

Living in the city represents a great challenge for organisms that are exposed to the novel environmental conditions inherent to urbanization. Recent studies have highlighted the ecological impact that urbanization poses on the acoustic phenotype and singing routines of birds. However, the organization and structure of avian dawn choruses in urban...