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Inequalities in noise will affect urban wildlife

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 8, pages 163–174 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Understanding how systemic biases influence local ecological communities is essential for developing just and equitable environmental practices that prioritize both human and wildlife well-being. With over 270 million residents inhabiting urban areas in the United States, the socioecological consequences of racially targeted zoning, such as redlining, need to be considered in urban planning. There is a growing body of literature documenting the relationships between redlining and the inequitable distribution of environmental harms and goods, green space cover and pollutant exposure. However, it remains unknown whether historical redlining affects the distribution of urban noise or whether inequitable noise drives an ecological change in urban environments. Here we conducted a spatial analysis of how urban noise corresponds to the distribution of redlining categories and a systematic literature review to summarize the effects of noise on wildlife in urban landscapes. We found strong evidence to indicate that noise is inequitably distributed in redlined urban communities across the United States, and that inequitable noise may drive complex biological responses across diverse urban wildlife, reinforcing the interrelatedness of socioecological outcomes. These findings lay a foundation for future research that advances relationships between acoustic and urban ecology through centring equity and challenging systems of oppression in wildlife studies.

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Fig. 1: Noise pollution levels across the four Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining grades for 83 US cities.
Fig. 2: Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining grades and noise pollution levels across four US urban areas.
Fig. 3: Scope of literature review findings.
Fig. 4: Scope of the effects of noise on urban wildlife.

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Data availability

All analysed data are available on Dryad licensed under a CC0 licence, which allows future users to distribute, remix, adapt and build on the material in any medium or format, with no conditions. Data can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m998 (ref. 96).

Code availability

All analysed code is publicly available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7843664 (ref. 97).

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. McKenna for providing feedback on an early draft of the manuscript. This research was funded by Colorado State University. J.R.N.-O., T.J.L., E.A. and M.L. were supported by NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. K.A.S. was supported by an American Association of University Women Fellowship.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jasmine R. Nelson-Olivieri, Tamara J. Layden.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Jasmine R. Nelson-Olivieri, Tamara J. Layden, Edder Antunez, Ali Khalighifar, Monica Lasky, Steven Starr, Anahita K. Verahrami & Sara P. Bombaci

  2. Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Ecology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA

    Theresa M. Laverty

  3. Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA

    Karina A. Sanchez

  4. School of Environmental and Natural Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, UK

    Graeme Shannon

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T.M.L. and S.P.B. conceived the initial study. J.R.N.-O., T.J.L., E.A., A.K., M.L., T.M.L., G.S., K.A.S., S.S., A.K.V. and S.P.B. collected review data, participated in data analyses and wrote the initial draft of the article. K.A.S. and S.P.B. conducted the spatial analyses and modelling approaches. All authors contributed to revisions.

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Correspondence to Sara P. Bombaci.

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Nelson-Olivieri, J.R., Layden, T.J., Antunez, E. et al. Inequalities in noise will affect urban wildlife. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 163–174 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02257-9

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