Songbird community ecology and habitat selection in the Chicago area

ii Urbanization has considerable effects on native flora and fauna, and is likely the most important driver of extinction. Two major stressors that have been shown to strongly impact wildlife communities in urban areas are habitat loss and fragmentation, which expose organisms in remnants to increased stressors associated with edges. Another potential stressor is the encroachment of invasive vegetation. Invasive plants are highly successful colonizers of natural habitats within urban environments, yet their impacts on native fauna remain largely unknown. I was interested in examining how these stressors impacted bird communities. Specifically, I addressed two questions: (1) how do exotic shrub invasions impact woodland songbirds within urban landscapes? and (2), how do bird communities change across forest-suburb boundaries? Field work was conducted in the Chicago metropolitan area during the breeding seasons of 2010 and 2011. I found that even though measures of invasive vegetation were only weakly correlated with avian community structure (i.e. a matrix of all species and their relative abundances at each plot), both species richness and the conservation value of birds within a plot decreased with an