Biodiversity dataset of vascular plants and birds in Chinese urban greenspace

Urban greenspace plays an important role in buffering the threat of urbanization to biodiversity. Biodiversity research in urban green spaces is essential for understanding the impacts of human activities on biodiversity and the associated ecosystem functioning and services in urban ecosystems. However, we lack large-scale biodiversity datasets in urban green spaces for macroecological studies. In this paper, we provided a comprehensive biodiversity dataset of vascular plant and bird species in 286 university campuses and 118 urban parks in 143 cities in China, covering a wide range with different levels of urbanization (20–50°N in latitude and 81–130°E in longitude). Plant species were classified into different growth forms, and bird species were identified as resident or migrant. In total, the dataset contains 46,558 occurrence records for 5,915 plant species (about 18% of all Chinese vascular plant species) and 6,423 records for 546 bird species (around 40% of all recorded bird species in China). This dataset provides an important data source for evaluating the anthropogenic effects of biodiversity changes and advancing urban ecology.

Methods
For biodiversity data, we conducted a literature search to collect the plant and bird list data in university campuses and urban parks.

For the environmental variables of campus and urban parks, we extracted geographic coordinates, area, established years, and elevations from the relevant primary data sources.

To standardize the taxonomic names of plants, we followed The Plant List v1.1, and to validate the taxonomic names of birds, we referred to the data from a checklist on the classification and distribution of the birds of China.