The expansion of urban areas is currently one of themost important worldwide landscape\udchanges. This process, termed urbanization, has important ecological effects and is\udknown to alter many aspects of the biology of organisms (including birds). However,\udhuman-nature interactions can also be affected by this process. We hypothesized that\udurbanization can particularly affect how intensively we investigate birds. We predict that\udspecies living in close proximity to humans will be more easily or preferably studied, thus\udpromoting a bias in research effort toward urban birds. In order to test this hypothesis\udwe have collected a detailed database of urban and non-urban avian communities\udincluding information from five biogeographic realms and more than 750 bird species.\udWe obtained four different indicators of research effort (two previously considered and\udtwo new ones) as well as information on different confounding factors that are known\udto affect research effort such as conservation status, body mass, distribution range\udand phylogeny, in addition to the previously unconsidered historical factor of year of\uddescription of the species. We found a positive and significant association between\udthe degree of urbanization of a species and how frequently it is investigated. We also\udfound the expected effect for biogeographic realm, body mass and distribution range,\udand year of description, but not for conservation status. In addition, we found a strong\udcorrelation among all research effort variables which support the use of Google Scholar\udas a reliable source for these kind of studies. Our findings suggest that urbanization is not\udonly affecting the biology of organisms but also how we study them. These results might\udhave important implications if this research bias is maintained in the long term. Future\udinvestigation should aim at exploring the ultimate reasons for this research bias toward\udurban birds and whether it is also happening for other groups of organisms.
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