Influence of the environmental complexity of green forest areas in gated communities in the ecology of urban birds

The landscape compositionof Brazilian cities has been changing, with the growing of the so-called «gated communities» (LF), with a clear temporal and spatial change in land use. These LFhostforest green areas (AVF), and usually are located outside the central areas, in formerly agricultural or natural sites. Little is known about the importance of these AVF for biodiversity conservation, since studies onurban birdsoften address public areas. Thus, we aimto analyze the influence of the vegetation structural complexity of AVF in LF on bird’s ecology and conservation. We performed this study in Sorocaba (SP, Brazil) in 17 LF, collecting datafrom September 2016 to August 2017. We sampled birds by 48 fixed points (one to six per LF), evaluating 10 environmental variables in 10x10m plots aroundthese points. We recorded 62 species of birds. We found that some environmental variables (tree richness, number of standing dead trees, size and percentage of AVF in relation to the total LF size) have positively influenced richness of bird species, supportingthe theory of environmental heterogeneity. We verified that most of these birds are forest-dependent (n = 9; 15%) and semidependent (n = 27; 45%). Thus, AVF with greater extensions harbor largerbird biodiversity, representing important data to support public policies, which should focus conservation in the most extensive and intact LF of AVF.