New Paper Alert! Urban birds and solid waste pollution

In the challenging, the pandemic year of 2020, Zuzanna was on an internship at Wild Urban Evolution and Ecology Lab, Centre of New Technologies, University of Warsaw. During the internship, with the Lab team, she conducted a study about the relation between urbanization, solid waste pollution and two urban adapter species: great and blue tit.

The team collected data about environmental solid waste pollution, urbanization, human presence and life histories of tits and their nest design.

Collected data revealed that solid waste pollution increases with higher human presence and higher levels of urbanization, but it does not relate to the nest design of focal species. In nest design of two tit species, natural nest materials, namely fur and feathers – key materials for thermal properties of nests - were negatively related to anthropogenic nest materials. It is possible, that birds may replace unavailable animal originated nest materials with easily accessible anthropogenic nest materials in a human-altered environment.

Surprisingly, there was a negative relationship between anthropogenic nest materials and only the blue tit fitness (expressed in numbers of hatchlings and fledglings), suggesting species-specific vulnerability of urban birds to solid waste pollution.

Read more here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972203131X

(photo by Weronika Baranowska)