Our research project aims to gather data to answer the question of how noise pollution across NYC, mainly from modes of aviation and roads, impacts bird biodiversity across urban and suburban parks. By analyzing statistics from ebird.org and the Department of Transportation’s National Transportation Noise Map, we uncovered patterns in bird populations by year and season, as well as how noise level in the analyzed areas correlates with bird biodiversity. We hypothesized that higher levels of noise pollution in urban residential areas would result in lower diversity of bird species compared to suburban residential areas across NYC, assuming it would disrupt communication, mating calls, and possibly even temporal behaviors like nesting and migration.

However, our results demonstrated a weak relationship between noise pollution and bird biodiversity, with our line of best fit having a slope of 0 and R^2 value of 0. As the graph was dependent on how the data collected for 2018 and 2020 related to the data for 2016, it was based on ratios; we anticipated a downward trend for 2018 and increased biodiversity in 2020 (as noise levels increased in 2018, and fell in 2020 due to the pandemic), but it’s clear that there was no relation. However, despite these results discrediting our hypothesis, it was noticed that suburban parks, which possessed significantly less noise pollution than urban parks, tended to have greater biodiversity, despite their smaller square footage. Ultimately, these findings demonstrate the need to minimizing noise pollution to maintain wildlife across NYC.