Understanding species-specific responses to urbanization is essential to mitigate and preserve biodiversity in the face of increasing urbanization, but a major challenge is how to estimate urban tolerances for a wide array of species applicable over disparate regions. A promising approach is to assess urban tolerance by integrating geo-referenced information on species detections from citizen science data with estimations of urbanization intensity based on remotely-sensed night-time lights. While such citizen science urbanness scores (CSUS) are cost-effective, intuitive, and easily-repeatable anywhere in the world, whether the scores accurately describe urban tolerance still awaits empirical verification. By analysing >900 bird species worldwide, we find that CSUS correlates well with a standard measure of urban tolerance based on changes in abundance between urbanized and non-urbanized nearby habitats. Our analyses show that there is substantial variability in the relationship between these two metrics, but nevertheless highlights the potential for the CSUS approach in the future. Future improvements to the index, including incorporating rare species, and understanding the influence of intra-specific variability in response to urbanization, will be necessary to maximize the broad utility of the approach.

面对日益加剧的城市化，了解特定物种对城市化的反应对于减轻和保护生物多样性至关重要，但是一个主要挑战是如何估算适用于不同地区的多种物种的城市耐受性。一种有前途的方法是通过将来自市民科学数据的物种检测地理参考信息与基于遥感夜间灯的城市化强度估计值相结合来评估城市容忍度。尽管此类公民科学城市度评分（CSUS）在世界上任何地方都具有成本效益，直观且易于复制，但这些评分是否准确地描述了城市容忍度仍在等待经验验证。通过分析全球900多种鸟类，我们发现，CSUS与基于城市化和非城市化附近栖息地之间的丰度变化的城市容忍度的标准度量密切相关。我们的分析表明，这两个指标之间的关系存在很大差异，但仍凸显了CSUS方法在未来的潜力。为了使该方法的广泛应用最大化，将有必要对该指数进行进一步的改进，包括纳入稀有物种，并了解种内变异对城市化的影响。