Data from: Wealth does not buy richness: Plant and soil bacterial diversity in temperate suburban lawns are not influenced by income

Patterns of biodiversity in urban and suburban areas have been
increasingly linked to the behaviors and affluence of their residents.
Residents of affluent neighborhoods tend to plant more flowering plant
species and generally benefit from cooler temperatures and more tree
cover. These factors, among others, lead to increased plant, bird,
arthropod, and lizard biodiversity in affluent neighborhoods. This dataset
pertains to an investigation of this pattern in plant and soil bacterial
communities in suburban lawns in Raleigh, North Carolina. We surveyed the
diversity of plants and soil bacteria across 30 homes, located in census
block groups with median household incomes from $22,000 to $208,000.
Overall, we detected 144 plant genera and 7,908 bacterial OTUs. Although
bacterial richness increased with soil pH, and soil pH increased weakly
with household income, household income was nevertheless a poor predictor
of plant and soil bacterial diversity. The lack of correlation between
income and plant or bacterial diversity in our humid, subtropical study
area is consistent with a broader literature suggesting that effects of
affluence on biodiversity are most pronounced in arid climates. This
dataset protects the location of individual sampling locations for the
privacy of residents, but includes income information at the level of each
census block group. For each of the 30 sites, the dataset provides median
income of the census block group from 2014 census data; the number of OTUs
observed in the rarefied sample; calculated diversity metrics, including
Shannon's H and evenness, soil pH, and the number of plant genera
detected in 12 one-meter quadrats. OTU abundance per site is provided in a
separate file, and taxonomic information about each OTU is in a third
file.