Costs and Benefits of Urban Living in Raptors

Abstract

Increasing human populations have accelerated urbanization and altered natural habitats. This process began in the eighteenth century with the industrial revolution when workers began moving to cities leaving agricultural jobs for jobs in manufacturing. Global growth in human populations was accompanied by growth of cities, which has increased the demand of goods and services provided by the exploitation of natural ecosystems. Rapid worldwide urbanization has led to a rampant loss of natural habitats and habitat fragmentation, which alarmed to ecologists and conservationists that have focused their researches in last years to understand the response of wildlife to these new scenes. For birds, the number of published studies on urban effects has increased steadily (Marzluff et al. 2001; Marzluff 2017). However, raptors have been poorly studied during much years, mainly due to several limitations imposed by their natural history (i.e., low densities, large home ranges, variable reproductive behaviors, and inaccessible breeding sites) (Donázar et al. 2016) and the high costs necessary for these studies. Nowadays, research of raptors in urbanized habitats has increased considerably. We will focus on a variety of these aspects.