Arthropods in urban agroecosystems Seattle 2019

Like other urban green spaces, urban community gardens can act as biodiversity refugees, especially for small organisms like arthropods. In turn, arthropods can provide important ecosystem pest control services to these agroecosystems. Thus, an often-asked question among urban gardeners is how to improve gardens and surrounding areas for natural enemies and associated pest control services. We examine how local vegetation and garden characteristics, as well as the surrounding landscape composition affect ground-dwelling beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae and Staphylinidae), spiders (Aranea), opilionids (Opilionida), and ladybird beetles (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae), all of which are important predators. In the summer 2019, we collected predators, vegetation, ground cover, and garden and landscape characteristic data of ten community gardens in the city of Seattle, Washington. We found that different groups of natural enemies are associated with different environmental variables and at differ..., Study site
We conducted the study in the city of Seattle, Washington, located in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (47.6062° N, 122.3321° W). Seattle's population in 2020 was estimated to be 737,015 in an area of 83 square miles (Office of Planning and Community Development 2023). While Seattle is among the fastest growing cities in the US, the city is committed to protecting urban biodiversity in its various green-spaces (City of Seattle 2018) and has an increasing demand for urban agriculture. The Community Garden program alone oversees 89 community gardens throughout the city. These gardens occupy about 10 hectares where food is grown for gardeners and for the general public City of Seattle 2023).  
Our study took place in 10 of these urban community gardens. The gardens are managed in an allotment style where households rent and cultivate individual plots within the garden. The chosen gardens range in size from 240 to 16,187 m2, housing 21 to 259 individual plots, have been in operation fr..., , # Arthropods in urban agroecosystems Seattle 2019

This data set contains our response variables: abundance and species/family richness data for ground-dwelling beetles (Carabidae and Staphylinidae), spiders (Aranea) and opilionids (Opilionida), and ladybird beetles (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) in 10 urban community gardens in Seattle, WA (USA). Arthropods were counted/collected via visual counts, pitfalls, and sticky traps in a 20m x 20m plot in the center of each garden.
The dataset also contains our effect variables related to garden management (ground cover and vegetation, size and age of garden) and to landscape composition extracted from the 2011 National Land Cover Database (NLCD, 30-m resolution) in 500-m buffers from the center of each garden. Data were collected 3 times (rounds) during the summer 2019.

## Description of the data and file structure

Data file: 'SeattleBUGS2019.summaries.wide.csv'

Column A: Round 1-3 represents sampling round. 1= June 2019; 2= July 2019; 3= A...