Urbanization has been shown to strongly affect community composition of various taxa with potentially strong shifts in ecological interactions, including those between hosts and parasites. We investigated the effect of urbanization on the composition of arthropods in nests of great tits in Flanders, Belgium. These nests contain taxonomically and functionally diverse arthropod communities including parasites, predators, detritivores and accidental commensals. Using a standardized hierarchical sampling design with subplots (200 m × 200 m) nested in plots (3 km × 3 km) of varying urbanization levels, we collected arthropods from nests of resident great tits after the young had fledged. Arthropods were extracted, identified to Primary Taxonomical Groups (PTG) and counted. Using generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) we found diverging effects of urbanization on PTG occurrences and abundances at various levels, but we did not find an overall signal in arthropod diversity or richness. Also, visual inspection of non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) plots did not reveal any community differences between urbanization levels at plot or subplot scales. Land use and environmental variables at different distances around nestboxes did not contribute much to the variation between communities. Our results indicate that arthropod nestbox communities are generally not adversely affected by urbanization, and even city gardens and parks harbor comparable communities to forests and suburban areas. We thus found no evidence for a parasite release effect due to urbanization, nor an increased risk of parasitism in human-dominated environments.

事实表明，城市化会极大地影响各种生物分类的群落组成，并可能在生态相互作用（包括宿主与寄生虫之间的相互作用）方面产生重大变化。我们研究了城市化对比利时佛兰德大山雀巢中节肢动物组成的影响。这些巢穴包含分类和功能各异的节肢动物群落，其中包括寄生虫，捕食者，碎屑动物和偶然的共鸣。使用标准化的分层抽样设计，将子图（200 m×200 m）嵌套在不同城市化水平的地块（3 km×3 km）中，在幼雏成活后，我们从居住的大山雀的巢中收集了节肢动物。提取节肢动物，鉴定为主要分类学组（PTG）并计数。使用广义线性混合模型（GLMM），我们发现了城市化对不同水平PTG发生和丰度的影响，但并未发现节肢动物多样性或丰富度的总体信号。此外，对非度量多维标度（NMDS）地块的目视检查未发现在地块或子地块尺度上城市化水平之间的任何社区差异。巢箱周围不同距离处的土地利用和环境变量对社区之间的差异影响不大。我们的结果表明，节肢动物巢箱社区通常不会受到城市化的不利影响，甚至城市花园和公园都拥有与森林和郊区类似的社区。因此，我们没有发现因城市化导致寄生虫释放的证据，