Landscape context affects both capture probability and abundance of solitary bees in cities

It is intuitive to hypothesize that urban landscapes are broadly hostile to insects, but responses of wild bees to urbanization are inconsistent and often positive. We used a mark-recapture study of the bicolored sweat bee (Agapostemon virescens) to separate two possible causes of this pattern: differences in capture probability (bees are more attractive to sampling sites in low-resource areas) from patterns of true abundance (bees are equally abundant in high- and low-resource landscapes, as long as resources are present locally). To distinguish these possibilities, wee placed experimental patches of Echinacea purpurea, a favored floral resource, in and near community gardens along a landscape gradient of % impervious surface. We collected mark-recapture data of A. virescens visitation to these patches, and analyzed capture probability and abundance in relation to % impervious surface in the surrounding landscape, and local resource context, measured as inside or ou..., , # Landscape context affects both capture probability and abundance of solitary bees in cities

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.80gb5mm2j](10.5061/dryad.80gb5mm2j)

## Description of the data and file structure

This data set includes two  R files and four data files, as described below.

Note that creating Figure 3 also requires use of the t_col function, which we saved as a file called transparent.R. We obtained this function from [https://dataanalytics.org.uk/make-transparent-colors-in-r/](https://dataanalytics.org.uk/make-transparent-colors-in-r/) (most recently accessed 6/30/2025).

### Files and variables

#### File: Agapostemon_simple.R

**Description:** This file summarizes basic descriptive statistics from the mark-recapture data, including the number of unique individuals seen at each pot and the number of captures at each pot.  It creates Figures 3 a&b in the main manuscript.  It also includes analyses of community garden size, and figures of these relationships that were not incl...,