Urbanisation and nest building in birds: a review of threats and opportunities Reynolds, S. James Ibáñez Álamo, Juan Diego Sumasgutner, Petra Mainwaring, Mark C. Birds Community Conservation Ecological trap Nest design and site selection Pollution SJR would like to thank his undergraduate (Connor Barnes, Clare Davies, Emily Elwell, Corrie Grafton, Jacob Haddon, Claire Herlihy, Derek Law, Eleanor Leanne, Holly Mynott, Penny-Serena Pratt, Anna Smith, Peter Tasker, Alison Wildgoose, Amy Williams and Daniel Woodward) and postgraduate (Richard Bufton, Dan Hunt, Victoria Pattison-Willits and Jen Smith) ‘nest’ students, and Charles Deeming, who have all provided new insights about urban nests over the last few years. MCM thanks Charles Deeming, Tom Martin, Bret Tobalske and Blair Wolf for useful discussions on the topic of urban nesting birds. PS would like to thank the participants of the ‘Human-Raptor Interactions—From Conservation Priorities to Conflict Mitigation’ symposium, Arjun Amar, Daniel Berkowic, Shane McPherson and Steve Redpath for the useful discussions on the topic of urban conservation regarding human–wildlife conflicts. JDI-Á would like to thank Olivia Sanllorente for providing interesting discussions on the topic and her constant support. Finally, we all thank Dan Chamberlain and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments that improved the manuscript significantly. The world is urbanising rapidly, and it is predicted that by 2050, 66% of the global human population will be living in urban areas. Urbanisation is characterised by land-use changes such as increased residential housing, business development and transport infrastructure, resulting in habitat loss and fragmentation. Over the past two decades, interest has grown in how urbanisation influences fundamental aspects of avian biology such as life-history strategies, survival, breeding performance, behaviour and individual health. Here, we review current knowledge on how urbanisation influences the nesting biology of birds, which determines important fitness-associated processes such as nest predation and community assembly. We identify three major research areas: (i) nest sites of birds in urban areas, (ii) the composition of their nests, and (iii) how these aspects of their nesting biology influence their persistence (and therefore conservation efforts) in urban areas. We show that birds inhabiting urban areas nest in a wide variety of locations, some beneficial through exploitation of otherwise relatively empty avian ecological niches, but others detrimental when birds breed in ecological traps. We describe urban-associated changes in nesting materials such as plastic and cigarette butts, and discuss several functional hypotheses that propose the adaptive value and potential costs of this new nesting strategy. Urban areas provide a relatively new habitat in which to conserve birds, and we show that nestboxes and other artificial nest sites can be used successfully to conserve some, but not all, bird species. Finally, we identify those subject areas that warrant further research attention in the hope of advancing our understanding of the nesting biology of birds in urban areas. 2020-05-08T10:31:54Z 2020-05-08T10:31:54Z 2019-04-11 info:eu-repo/semantics/article James Reynolds, S., Ibáñez-Álamo, J.D., Sumasgutner, P. et al. Urbanisation and nest building in birds: a review of threats and opportunities. J Ornithol 160, 841–860 (2019). [https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-019-01657-8] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/61904 10.1007/s10336-019-01657-8 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Springer Nature