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Effects of Urbanization and Landscape on Gut Microbiomes in White-Crowned Sparrows

  • Host Microbe Interactions
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Abstract

Habitats are changing rapidly around the globe and urbanization is one of the primary drivers. Urbanization changes food availability, environmental stressors, and the prevalence of disease for many species. These changes can lead to divergence in phenotypic traits, including behavioral, physiological, and morphological features between urban and rural populations. Recent research highlights that urbanization is also changing the gut microbial communities found in a diverse group of host species. These changes have not been uniform, leaving uncertainty as to how urban habitats are shaping gut microbial communities. To better understand these effects, we investigated the gut bacterial communities of White-Crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) populations along an urbanization gradient in the San Francisco Bay area. We examined how gut bacterial communities vary with the local environment and host morphological characteristics. We found direct effects of environmental factors, including urban noise levels and territory land cover, as well as indirect effects through body size and condition, on alpha and beta diversity of gut microbial communities. We also found that urban and rural birds’ microbiomes differed in which variables predicted their diversity, with urban communities driven by host morphology, and rural communities driven by environmental factors. Elucidating these effects provides a better understanding of how urbanization affects wild avian physiology.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank a number of undergraduates who helped collect data in the field and lab for this project, especially Siyang Hu, Leanne Norden, and Nicole Moody. We thank Dr. James Fordyce for his extensive help with analyses. We also thank the members of the UTK writing workshop group for help with our manuscript, particularly Jonathan Dickey for sharing his data analysis scripts. This study was supported in part by funding from the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Tulane University, Newcomb Scholars Grant to L. Norden, and a National Science Foundation award to EPD (NSF IOS 1827290).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA

    Mae Berlow & Elizabeth P. Derryberry

  2. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    Mae Berlow, Jennifer N. Phillips & Elizabeth P. Derryberry

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, 93407, USA

    Jennifer N. Phillips

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  1. Mae Berlow
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Correspondence to Mae Berlow.

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Berlow, M., Phillips, J.N. & Derryberry, E.P. Effects of Urbanization and Landscape on Gut Microbiomes in White-Crowned Sparrows. Microb Ecol 81, 253–266 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-020-01569-8

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