Can birds provide information about invertebrates in urban landscapes? Evidence from urban greenspaces in Edinburgh, Scotland

Orestis Aslanidis * **

*School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, The King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JR.

**School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AS.

Pages: 60-65 ⏐ Published: 17 March 2026 ⏐DOI: https://doi.org/10.70145/BiSh0011

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Abstract

Monitoring biodiversity is essential for understanding ecosystem health, yet invertebrates remain underrepresented in biodiversity assessments due to the practical difficulties of sampling and identification. The use of proxy taxa that are widely monitored such as birds has been proposed to estimate invertebrate diversity indirectly, but evidence for these relationships is inconsistent. This study tested whether bird diversity and abundance could serve as proxies for invertebrate diversity and abundance across 60 urban sites in Edinburgh, Scotland. Birds were surveyed using fixed-radius point counts, and invertebrates were sampled through timed hand searches and leaf litter sieving. Linear mixed-effects models were used to test associations between bird and invertebrate metrics, both independently and after accounting for environmental variables including habitat type, temperature, and seasonal timing. Bird diversity and abundance were weak predictors of invertebrate diversity and abundance, with the strongest relationship, between singing bird species richness and invertebrate species richness, explaining only 5.4% of variation. After controlling for environmental factors, bird variables added less than 1% to model fit, while environmental predictors explained around 60% of variance, with habitat type and temperature showing the strongest effects. These results suggest that bird communities are unreliable proxies for invertebrate diversity at fine spatial scales in urban environments, and that environmental factors may provide more informative context for assessing invertebrate biodiversity.

Keywords: urban biodiversity monitoring, proxy taxa, bird diversity, invertebrate diversity, urban ecology

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