Introduction:

The birds in tropical cities are subject to changes in community composition and structure based on landscape properties and habitat heterogeneity. Urban landscapes offer a set of fragmented habitats restricting dispersion and promoting the metacommunity structure of birds.

Objective:

To analyze the structure of an urban bird community with a meta-community perspective.

Methods:

With a spatial array of 60 bird sampling points between May 2015 and February 2016, and estimations of landscape metrics with a satellite image classification, we measured the coherence, turnover, and boundary clumping of three subsets of birds to fit a metacommunity structure pattern and correlate with landscape properties of Tuxtla Gutierrez, a neotropical city with potential for bird conservation.

Results:

The bird species composition comprises a dominant subset of exotic and synurbic species, another of resident abundant species, and one of rare native species. The dominant species seem to be determined by a Clementsian structure, associated with a bird community with a similar response to the environmental gradient. Both dominant and rare species showed a nested structure associated with environmental filtering processes, such as the amount of available habitat. The occurrence and distribution of abundant to rare species composition were associated with the amount of natural vegetation cover, whereas the dominant species abundance with the extension of urban coverage.

Conclusions:

The bird species composition in urban landscapes of tropical dry forest regions can be structured as a metacommunity in response to a gradient of vegetation fragmentation due to anthropogenic changes. Synurbic and native species do not show a homogenization of diversity composition. To ensure the conditions for bird diversity conservation in tropical urban landscapes, knowledge of the correlation of landscape elements with community structure and habitat conditions in fragmented environments is needed.