Impacts of Anthropogenic Structures on Birds
A special issue of Diversity (ISSN 1424-2818).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2026 | Viewed by 1098
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
For millions of years, avian habitats have included the aerosphere. Navigating the aerosphere by day and night, under extreme temperatures and wind speeds, and obscured by clouds, rain, and fog, birds have doubtlessly adapted to natural obstacles along their flight paths. Flight as a principal mode of travel leaves most birds sensitive to collisions with structures that project vertically into the aerosphere. The recent proliferation of anthropogenic structures makes many birds vulnerable to collision injuries, mortality, and the energetic costs of collision avoidance, displacement, and barrier effects. Birds are known to collide with buildings ranging in size from homes to high-rise structures, communication towers including cell towers, above-ground transmission and electric distribution lines, wind turbines and associated meteorological towers, utility-scale solar facilities, and fences of many types. Almost anything humans build above ground could interfere with birds attempting to navigate the aerosphere as an essential medium of avian travel. The impacts of anthropogenic structures potentially apply to avian populations, ecological communities, the economy, and the human experience.
This Special Issue strives to further our understanding of the effects, causal factors, and potential solutions to the impacts of anthropogenic structures on birds. We welcome papers measuring or comparing impacts and furthering our understanding of causal factors based on behavioral or morphological attributes of birds or attributes of the anthropogenic structures themselves or the environmental settings in which birds encounter these structures. We also welcome papers on strategies to avoid or minimize impacts, and on measures to rectify or reduce impacts.
Dr. Kenneth Shawn Smallwood
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- birds
- buildings
- collisions
- communication towers
- fences
- transmission lines
- utility-scale solar facilities
- wind turbines
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