Indigenous versus exotic understorey plantings: Contrasting impacts on urban bee diversity

Urban environments pose a threat to biodiversity through processes such as habitat degradation and biotic homogenisation. Despite this, cities are increasingly recognised for their potential to conserve bees and other pollinators. Planting understorey vegetation is one way of providing more floral resources to support urban bee communities and the ecosystem services they provide. However, the influence of vegetation origin and landscape context on urban bee communities is unclear, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. We sampled the bee communities at 32 understorey plantings dominated by exotic or indigenous (native to the local bioregion) vegetation around inner Melbourne, Australia. For each site, we recorded the amount of impervious surface and irrigated turf in 200 m buffers. Indigenous plantings were found to promote significantly greater alpha and beta diversity in bee communities compared to exotic plantings. Particular plant taxa were highly effective at attracting a variety..., , , # Data from: Indigenous versus exotic understorey plantings: Contrasting impacts on urban bee diversity

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.fttdz091k](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fttdz091k)

## Description of the data and file structure

Supplementary data files for study “Indigenous versus exotic understorey plantings: contrasting impacts on urban bee diversity”, Burns et al. Contact Monique Burns ([[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])) with any questions.

**All files are in .csv format**.

* bee_species_plant_host_abundance_final.csv: A matrix of bee (columns) and plant (rows) species observed interacting in this study. Numbers indicate the number of times a bee species was observed visiting the corresponding plant species. Used to develop a bee-plant interaction network.

- site_species_richness_final.csv: A table showing the number of bee and plant species identified at each surveyed site (beespp and plantspp, respectively), the area of the site (m2), the proportio...,