Urban gulls are a fascinating issue in recent times. Most people in the world now live in cities, where they are confronted with urban governance and its wildlife, such as cockroaches, squirrels, rats, pigeons and gulls, let's say. In the subarctic this issue is widely unstudied but matters equally while most people in the world do live in cities: The Anthropocene.

Here I present on a recent study by us on gulls using urban habitat surveys, 'Big Data', GIS, machine learning and its inference (Huettmann et al. 2023). I present that short-billed gulls swap in summer an ecological niche space with ravens, driven by human factors like industrialization, rivers and gravel pits and food subsidies whereas 'natural forests' now get overruled.

This work has implications how urban spaces are to be managed due to gulls being known as major disease reservoirs and perceived pests. Thus far, this scheme is poorly addressed while an effective and sustainable municipal management does rule in the absence, with amateur bird watchers and contractors often dominating. An effective urban wildlife management is certainly lacking for most arctic and polar regions where pandemics currently affect such avian populations and subsequently can result into massive population crashes.

References (Selection)

Baltensperger, A. P., Mullet, T. C., Schmid, M. S., Humphries, G. R. W., Kövér, L., & Huettmann, F. (2013). Seasonal observations and machine-learning-based spatial model predictions for the common raven (Corvus corax) in the urban, sub-arctic environment of Fairbanks, Alaska. Polar Biology, 36, 1587-1599.

Benmazouz, I., Jokimäki, J., Juhasz, L., Kaisanlahti-Jokimäki, M. L., Paladi, P., Kardos, G., ... & Kövér, L. (2023). Morphological changes in hooded crows (Corvus cornix) related to urbanization. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 11(1196075).

Forman, R. T. (2014). Urban ecology: science of cities. Cambridge University Press.

Hansen, L., & Huettmann, F. (2020). Swallows and Sparrows in the Human Street-Market Interface of Urban Nepal: Towards a First Open Access GIS Data and Model Inference on the Role of Religion and Culture in Bird Distribution. Hindu Kush-Himalaya watersheds downhill: Landscape ecology and conservation perspectives, 361-399.

Huettmann, F., Kövér, L., Robold, R., Spangler, M., & Steiner, M. (2023). Model-based prediction of a vacant summer niche in a subarctic urbanscape: A multi-year open access data analysis of a ‘niche swap’ by short-billed Gulls. Ecological Informatics, 102364.

Kövér, L., Gyüre, P., Balogh, P., Huettmann, F., Lengyel, S., & Juhász, L. (2015). Recent colonization and nest site selection of the Hooded Crow (Corvus corone cornix L.) in an urban environment. Landscape and Urban Planning, 133, 78-86.

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