Environmental map layers for Los Angeles environmental assessment project

In an increasingly urbanized world, there is a need to study urban areas as their own class of ecosystems as well as assess the impacts of anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. However, collecting a sufficient number of species observations to estimate patterns of biodiversity in a city can be costly. Here we investigated the use of community science-based data on species occurrences, combined with species distribution models (SDMs), built using MaxEnt and remotely-sensed measures of the environment, to predict the distribution of a number of species across the urban environment of Los Angeles. By selecting species with the most accurate SDMs, and then summarizing these by class, we were able to produce two species richness models (SRMs) to predict biodiversity patterns for species in the class Aves and Magnoliopsida and how they respond to a variety of natural and anthropogenic environmental gradients.    We found that species considered native to Los Angeles tend to have significantl...