Data from: Vegetation biomass and landscape context shape web-building spider dietary niche breadth in urban vacant lots

Legacy cities often encompass large numbers of vacant land parcels that
can be managed as green spaces to promote biodiversity and provide
ecosystem services. We aimed to understand how the frequency of mowing and
the extent of landscape fragmentation surrounding a vacant lot habitat
influenced predator diets and shaped predator communities. We focused on a
group of small web-building spiders, as their dispersal success can be
influenced by landscape variables, and their establishment is sensitive to
local management intensity. We hypothesized that reduced landscape
fragmentation and mowing frequency would sustain a species-rich and
abundant community of these generalist predators by supporting a high
dietary niche breadth and reducing exploitative competition, measured as
dietary niche overlap. There are two sets of raw data: pitfall trap counts
per location with environmental data, and hand-collected/aspirated records
of Linyphiidae and Tetragnathidae spiders with associated diet records
from barcoding. Abundance metrics in further sheets are summed from the
pitfall data per site (Linyphiidae or 'Liny' is always an
abbreviation for the abundance of Linyphiidae and Tetragnathidae spiders
together).  Sampling data includes site name/abbreviation/number,
treatment (control or meadow), date collected, and percent and proportion
of impervious surface in a 500m buffer surrounding a site (calculated in
ArcGIS Pro). Vegetative data includes biomass (grams), community
weighted mean (cwm), vegetation height (cm), and community weighted mean
number of blooms. Biomass was calculated using both weight in grams and
the comparative yield method (Haydock & Shaw 1975); the values
represent the estimated biomass per site. The same is true of vegetation
height and blooms; we collected data and then conducted a community
weighted means method to analyze their presence and characteristics for
the whole plot.