Yale study says bird-sighting data is skewed by historical redlining in cities

Our nation’s legacy of racist housing policies could be warping our conservation and climate efforts today, particularly when it comes to trees and birds, according to a recent study out of Yale University.

Crowdsourced bird-sighting databases are important for conservation, as they guide biodiversity conservation and restoration decisions at all levels of municipal government. The Yale study shows that observation data largely comes from white, affluent neighborhoods, and that similar data from historically redlined neighborhoods are severely lacking.

“I can show you how blatant it is,” said Diego Ellis Soto, a Yale Ph.D. student as he pulled up a computer screen of his findings for CT Insider.

Soto overlaid bird-sighting data onto digitized maps of historically redlined neighborhoods — areas segregated by housing or insurance industries that are heavily populated by minorities — and checked for correlations using software. What he found shocked him.

Bird-sighting data is extremely dense and deep in the affluent Prospect Hill neighborhood, home of Albertus Magnus College, several Yale departments, and many historic manor homes. The neighborhood has about 3,000 bird sighting records per square mile with 109 different species of birds.

Yet Dixwell, a historically Black neighborhood only a couple blocks away, had 1,000 times fewer recordings of bird sightings. Soto said that New Haven had some of the sharpest disparities in the nation.

“Nobody can tell me that these birds don’t use the same airspace,” said Soto. But while rich areas have the bird data to advocate for environmental funding, “Dixwell doesn’t have that.”

Soto said decisions on how to protect bird habitats were mostly based on large, crowdsourced datasets. Birdwatchers nationwide report sightings on apps like iNaturalist, eBird or Zooniverse. This data is fed to conservation organizations, government agencies and researchers who make decisions based on this information.

“If we don’t account for socioeconomic inequality in where we collect data on birds, our models on where birds live would mostly be where rich people live,” said Soto. “Which means at a time of investing in conserving land, we’re not going to have equality at our center because this data is so skewed.”

In 1933 the federal government began underwriting mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration, but not for everyone. Whole neighborhoods, particularly those inhabited by Black people, were deemed at financial risk in a racially discriminatory process known as redlining. The practice got its name from literally outlining “undesirable” neighborhoods in red, where minorities were steered to rent or purchase homes. Redlining, combined with racially-restrictive neighborhood housing covenants under the guise of a discriminatory homeowners’ association, ultimately concentrated Black Americans in impoverished neighborhoods.

Robert Nelson a historian and scholar of redlining, said the practice codified a policy that normalized a racist society.

“Redlining maps turned something that was happening, for lack of a better term, because of the market … into prescriptive policies,” said Nelson, who helps run the Mapping Inequality Project, which digitizes old redlining maps for educational and research purposes. “That has all kinds of consequences down the road, like where the highways and interstates get sited. Where urban renewal bulldozes whole neighborhoods.”