What drives the positive correlation between human population density and bird species richness in Australia?

Aim: To test six hypotheses that could explain or mediate the positive correlation between human population density (HPD) and bird species richness while controlling for biased sampling effort. These hypotheses were labelled as follows: productivity (net primary productivity, NPP); inherent heterogeneity (diversity of vegetation types); anthropogenic heterogeneity (diversity of land uses); conservation policy (proportion of conservation land); increased productivity (humaninduced productivity increases); and the reduced-slope hypothesis (which predicts that humans have a negative impact on species numbers across the full range of variation in HPD).