Disentangling the biotic and abiotic drivers of bird–building collisions in a tropical Asian city with ecological niche modeling

Abstract

Bird collisions with buildings are responsible for a large number of bird deaths in cities around the world, yet they remain poorly studied outside North America. We conducted one of the first citywide fine‐scale and landscape‐scale analyses of bird–building collisions in Asia and used maximum entropy modeling (as commonly applied to species distribution modeling) in a novel way to assess the drivers of bird–building collisions in the tropical city‐state of Singapore. We combined 7 years of community science observations with publicly available building and remote sensing data. Drivers of bird–building collisions varied among taxa. Some migratory taxa had a higher relative collision risk that was linked to areas with high building densities and high levels of nocturnal blue light pollution. Nonmigratory taxa had a higher collision risk in areas near forest cover. Projecting our results onto official long‐term land‐use plans, we predicted that future increases in bird–building collision risk stemmed from increases in blue light pollution and encroachment of buildings into forested areas and identified 6 potential collision hotspots linked to future developments. Our results suggest that bird–building collision mitigation measures need to account for the different drivers of collision for resident and migratory species and show that combining community science and ecological modeling can be a powerful approach for analyzing bird–building collision data.

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