Understanding public conservation willingness is crucial for mitigating the global decline in avian diversity. Secondary school students, as key future actors and stakeholders in biodiversity conservation, represent a critical demographic, but their conservation willingness toward avian species remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a questionnaire survey in 64 secondary schools across eight riparian cities along the Yellow River in Henan Province, China. Using the Great Bustard (Otis tarda)—a national first-class protected species and local conservation flagship—as the focal species, we constructed piecewise structural equation models (SEMs) to identify the key factors influencing students' conservation willingness. The questionnaire results revealed that although nearly 90% of students supported the Great Bustard conservation, only about 30% understood both its protection class and habitat characteristics, and less than half had relevant nature experience or had participated in local forestry departments' science communication activities. The piecewise SEM results demonstrated that students' interest in birds, knowledge level of the Great Bustard, and participation in science communication activities all exerted direct and significant positive influences on their conservation willingness. In addition to its direct effect, science communication engagement also indirectly enhanced conservation willingness by strengthening interest and knowledge, while the effects of grade level and nature experience were exclusively indirect, operating through the same pathways. To improve the effective conservation of the Great Bustard, we recommend that secondary schools strengthen collaborations with universities and nature reserves to enrich students' nature experience, and that local forestry departments further expand the coverage and depth of science communication activities targeting adolescent groups.

Urbanization is one of the most extreme forms of land-use alteration that is advancing across the world with unprecedented speed. As the largest developing country, China has developed a unique path through its high speed and large scale of urbanization, offering valuable research opportunities for avian ecology. However, a comprehensive review on how birds respond to urbanization in China is still lacking. Here, we systematically reviewed 274 studies published from 1962 to 2024 to determine the research trends, current insights, and future directions of avian response to urbanization in China. We synthesized research trends across four core avian response dimensions to urbanization—diversity, behavior, physiology, and life-history—and their applications in conservation strategy design. The number of publications in avian response to urbanization in China increased annually, and it is influenced by China’s developing policies of urbanization. The results also showed an unbalanced geographical pattern of the publications, as the research preferences are relatively prevalent in the developed areas of eastern China. In contrast, there are insufficient studies in the emerging urbanizing areas in the western and northeastern China. Regarding the research contents, most existing studies are focusing on the patterns of bird diversity, while there are few studies on the underlying mechanisms, such as physiological adjustments and life-history strategies. In addition, passerines are the most frequent ones among the studied species. Integrating multidimensional urbanization indices and citizen science data are gradually becoming a new trend in recent years. Our study emphasizes that future studies should pay more attention to the response mechanism of birds in urbanizing processes, multidimensional and interdisciplinary studies, and the transformation of the research results into conservation practices.

The acceleration of global urbanization has caused habitat loss, fragmentation, and decrease of habitat quality, often leading to a decline in biodiversity. However, most previous urbanization studies focused on taxonomic diversity, with relatively less research on functional and phylogenetic diversity. In this study, we examined the phylogenetic and functional diversity and underlying influencing factors of bird communities in 37 urban parks in Nanjing, China. We conducted a systematic survey of bird communities in Nanjing urban parks and selected six park characteristics that are generally considered to affect bird diversity. Model selection based on corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) and model averaging showed that park area, habitat diversity and building index (a proxy for the degree of urbanization) were significant factors affecting avian phylogenetic and functional diversity in Nanjing urban parks. Specifically, habitat diversity and park area were positively correlated with bird diversity, while the building index was negatively correlated with bird diversity. Moreover, the phylogenetic and functional structures of urban bird communities exhibited a clustered pattern, indicating that environmental filtering might play a role in shaping community composition. In addition, building index had certain impact on the construction of bird phylogenetic communities in urban parks. Our results suggest that expanding park areas, increasing habitat diversity and reducing building indexes may be effective measures to increase the avian phylogenetic and functional diversity in our system.

Nestedness is one of the important patterns in island biogeography, community ecology and conservation biology. However, most previous nestedness studies focus on the taxonomic dimension while neglecting the functional and phylogenetic processes in generating nestedness. Moreover, few studies have examined the seasonal change of the nestedness and underlying processes. Here, we examined the seasonal nestedness of bird assemblages in taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic dimensions, and determined the underlying processes of nestedness patterns in the Zhoushan Archipelago, China. We surveyed the occurrence, abundance, and habitats of birds on 40 islands. We calculated taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic nestedness using WNODF and treeNODF. We determined the processes underlying nestedness by relating nestedness ranks to island characteristics and species traits. The WNODF analyses showed that bird assemblages in winter and summer were both significantly nested. The habitat-by-site matrix was also significantly nested. The nestedness of bird assemblages was significantly correlated with island area, habitat diversity, habitat specificity, minimum area requirement, habitat specificity and hand-wing index (HWI) of birds in both seasons. While the distance to the nearest mainland (DTM) exerted the influence on nestedness in summer, the distance to the nearest larger island (DTNL) affected nestedness only in winter. However, the nestedness of bird assemblages was not caused by passive sampling or human disturbance. The results of treeNODF analyses illustrated that bird assemblages were functionally and phylogenetically nested in summer and winter, but the exact mechanisms were somewhat different in these two seasons. Overall, our results supported the habitat nestedness hypothesis, selective extinction hypothesis, and selective colonization hypothesis in both seasons. From a conservation viewpoint, we should protect islands with large area and diverse habitats, islands close to the mainland, and species with large area requirement and high habitat specificity to prevent local extinction.

Urbanization induced by human activities presents both challenges and adaptive opportunities for wildlife. One notable impact of urban sprawl is the vast amount of waste it produces, which has discernible effects on wildlife. Interestingly, an emerging trend has been observed that birds are incorporating anthropogenic materials into their nests. However, the relationship between anthropogenic nesting materials (ANMs) and the reproductive performance of urban birds is unclear. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the incorporation of ANMs into nests and the reproductive performance of Chinese Bulbuls (Pycnonotus sinensis) by monitoring and collecting data on 136 breeding nests in Hangzhou, China. We gathered data on seven reproductive traits of Chinese Bulbuls, including laying date, incubation period, nestling period, clutch size, egg volume, hatching success rate, and fledging success rate. We then calculated the urbanization synthetic index as a measure of the level of urbanization and examined its relationship with the proportion and weight of ANMs. Through examination of nest components, we observed significant increase in the proportion and weight of ANMs with the urbanization synthetic index. Notably, we found a higher hatching success rate of Chinese Bulbuls with an increasing proportion of ANMs. However, the inclusion of ANMs in nests was not correlated with other reproductive traits of Chinese Bulbuls. Overall, the use of ANMs by Chinese Bulbuls is consistent with the adaptive hypothesis and the availability hypothesis. Further studies should use controlled experiments to investigate the impact of ANMs on avian reproductive success.

Urbanization brings new selection pressures to wildlife living in cities, and changes in the life-history traits of urban species can reflect their responses to such pressures. To date, most of the studies investigating the impacts of urbanization on avian life-history traits are conducted in Europe and North America, while such studies are often lacking in quickly developing countries in Asia (e.g., China). In this study, we examined the variations in reproductive life-history traits of Chinese Bulbuls (Pycnonotus sinensis) along the urbanization gradient in Hangzhou, China. We detected 234 natural nests of Chinese Bulbuls and continuously monitored them in two continuous breeding seasons from 2012 to 2013. We collected data on seven life-history traits (laying date, incubation period, nestling period, clutch size, egg volume, hatching success rate, and fledging success rate). We used infrared cameras to record the number of feedings per hour as the measure of food resources for the nestlings. We measured nest predation pressure by monitoring 148 natural breeding nests during breeding seasons and 54 artificial nests immediately after breeding seasons. We then calculated the urbanization synthetic index (USI) as a measure of the level of urbanization and examined its relationship with the seven life-history traits. We found that Chinese Bulbuls laid eggs significantly earlier with increasing USI. However, the other six life-history traits did not vary significantly with the USI. Moreover, the feeding frequency of chicks increased significantly with the USI, but the nest predation pressure of Chinese Bulbuls decreased significantly with the USI. Increased food resources and reduced nest predation pressure in cities may lead to earlier laying date of Chinese Bulbuls. Further study should test whether the earlier laying date of Chinese Bulbuls is the result of phenotypic plasticity or genetic change.

Nest predation is an essential factor affecting bird population density, reproductive ecology and life cycle. However, there are still contradictory results about how nest predation pressure changes with urbanization. One of the reasons for the controversy is that previous studies often use artificial nests to investigate nest predation, but the result of artificial nests is often biased and contrary to that of natural nests. Therefore, it is important to perform nest predation experiments simultaneously with both natural and artificial nests. In this study, we examined the change of nest predation pressure on the Chinese Bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis) along the urbanization gradient in Hangzhou, China. We detected 148 natural nests of Chinese Bulbuls and continuously monitored them in two continuous breeding seasons from 2012 to 2013. After the breeding season, we placed artificial eggs in natural nests of Chinese Bulbuls to investigate the changes in nest predation pressure and used infrared cameras to record the predators. We then calculated the urbanization synthetic index (USI) as the measure of the degree of urbanization and examined its relationship with nest predation pressure. We found that no matter whether natural nests or artificial eggs were used, the nest predation pressure always decreased significantly with the degree of urbanization. The average height of shrubs within 10 ​m of the nest differed significantly between the predated and unpredated nests, which also affected the risk of nest predation. Our study highlights the importance of using natural and artificial nests simultaneously to conduct nest predation experiments, which can reduce the bias or errors caused by only using artificial nests. We also recommend the use of infrared cameras in future nest predation studies, which has obvious advantages in monitoring and identifying potential predators.