Population is increasing explosively all over the world. Especially, urban population is expanding rapidly. With these changes, cities are expanding year by year. Although the accelerating global spread of urbanization, there are only a few studies about the urban ecosystem. However, understanding biodiversity in urban areas is required for efficient land-use planning.

This study aimed to make the predicting bird distribution in the urban area including in the city of Japan, Sapporo, especially focusing on the roles of parks, road side trees and garden trees. We used NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) as an indicator of habitat quality in an urban area. We consider that NDVI is an efficient indicator for cost and time and estimate biodiversity across the global urban environments.

We established 100 sampling sites (100m×100m) laid off in Sapporo city and counted number of observed bird species in each site during the breeding season in 2011. Furthermore, we calculated (1) NDVI in the bird sampling sites, (2) distance from each sampling site to the large forest and (3) connectivity of green spaces for each site, and used as explanatory variables. With these values we predict bird distribution, and discuss the role of green spaces arrangement in an urban area.