![]() … I am learning so much! And it’s given me something positive to focus on during this strange time we are in right now.” “I signed up to observe once a week for 10 minutes but it has become so much more than that. “I am loving being a part of this!” said Nadine Santo Pietro, a study volunteer, in a written comment as part of the project. This community science approach allowed the researchers to gather data despite the lockdowns and gave many volunteers a welcomed distraction from the stresses of the pandemic. The volunteers chose their own monitoring sites - mostly backyards and parks where they could safely comply with public health orders - and recorded the birds they observed over a 10-minute period at least once a week. In the spring of 2020, Sanderfoot and colleagues recruited more than 900 community scientists in the Pacific Northwest to participate in the study. That’s very interesting, because we would expect that whether a habitat was mostly covered in concrete or vegetation would tell you something about what birds would be there,” Sanderfoot said. ![]() “For about half of the species we observed, neither land use nor canopy cover had an effect on their site use. “Our findings suggest that some birds may have been able to use more spaces in cities because our human footprint was a little lighter,” said Sanderfoot, who completed the study as a doctoral researcher in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and is now a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. ![]() But for birds that inhabit developed areas of the Pacific Northwest, the reduction in noise and commotion from pandemic lockdowns may have allowed them to use a wider range of habitats in cities.Ī new University of Washington study led by Olivia Sanderfoot reports that many birds were just as likely to be found in highly developed urban areas as they were in less-developed green spaces during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Holly Hauserįor humans, the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were a stressful time, marked by fear, isolation, canceled plans and uncertainty.
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