DOI: 10.5061/dryad.qfttdz0d6
title: Data from: The importance of street trees to urban avifauna

description: Street trees are public resources planted in a municipality’s right-of-way
 and are a considerable component of urban forests throughout the world.
 Street trees provide numerous benefits to people. However, many
 metropolitan areas have a poor understanding of the value of street trees
 to wildlife, which presents a gap in our knowledge of conservation in
 urban ecosystems. Greater Los Angeles (LA) is a global city harboring one
 of the most diverse and extensive urban forests on the planet. The vast
 majority of the urban forest is exotic in geographic origin, planted
 throughout LA following the influx of irrigated water in the early 1900s.
 In addition to its extensive urban forest, LA is home to a high diversity
 of birds, which utilize the metropolis throughout the annual cycle. The
 cover of the urban forest, and likely street trees, varies dramatically
 across a socioeconomic gradient. However, it is unknown how this
 variability influences avian communities. To understand the importance of
 street trees to urban avifauna, we documented foraging behavior by birds
 on native and exotic street trees across a socioeconomic gradient
 throughout LA. Affluent communities harbored a unique composition of
 street trees, including denser and larger trees than lower-income
 communities, which in turn, attracted nearly five times the density of
 feeding birds. Foraging birds strongly preferred two native street-tree
 species as feeding substrates, the Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia) and
 the California Sycamore (Platanus racemosa), and a handful of exotic tree
 species, including the Chinese Elm (Ulmus parvifolia), the Carrotwood
 (Cupaniopsis anacardioides), and the Southern Live Oak (Quercus
 virginiana), in greater proportion than their availability throughout the
 cityscape (2-3x their availability). Eighty-three percent of street tree
 species (n = 108, total) were used in a lower proportion than their
 availability by feeding birds, and nearly all were exotic in origin. Our
 findings highlight the positive influence of street trees on urban
 avifauna. In particular, our results suggest that improved street-tree
 management in lower-income communities would likely positively benefit
 birds. Further, our study provides support for the high value of native
 street tree species and select exotic species as important habitat for
 feeding birds.
description: (1)<em><strong> Street_tree_bird_foraging_walking_routes_EAP19-0535 </strong></em>--&gt; Google Earth, kmz file of all 36 walking routes where all street tree and avian foraging data were collected. The walking routes were delineated into three categories (low-, medium-, and high-income), based on 2010 census tract data, from which 36 census tracts were randomly selected. The walking routes were established in residential neighborhoods with street trees and a walkway/sidewalk. (2) <em><strong>Street_trees_EAP19-0535</strong></em> --&gt; 7636 street trees measured along the 36 walking routes. We identified and measured to dbh of all trees on all routes.  (3) <em><strong>Bird_foraging_EAP19-0535 </strong></em>--&gt; 1546 bird foraging observations collected on street trees along the 36 walking routes.