Rapid responses of bees and butterflies but not birds to targeted urban road verge habitat enhancements

Cities provide opportunities for biodiversity conservation through the design of urban greenspaces as wildlife habitat. A significant proportion of urban public land is narrow linear road verges, though their small size and harsh environmental conditions (e.g. high soil temperatures) may limit their ability to support plants and animals. We worked with a municipal government in a highly urbanised area to test whether conversion of standard road verges (e.g. lawn) to predominantly native understorey plants (forbs, grasses, and shrubs) selected for their abilities to tolerate harsh growing conditions and provide habitat increased the abundance and richness of bees, butterflies, and birds. We used a before-after-control-impact experiment and characterised temporal dynamics of biodiversity responses one year prior to planting and four years post planting. We also tested whether traits known to influence species responses to urbanisation (body size and feeding specialisation) mediated respon..., , , # Rapid responses of bees and butterflies but not birds to targeted urban road verge habitat enhancements

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7m0cfxq33](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7m0cfxq33)

These data comprise estimates of native bee, butterfly, and bird abundance and richness across 16 sites in Melbourne surveyed over four years, once before four of the sites received a habitat enhancement treatment and three times after the treatment.

## Description of the data and file structure

The data is structured as follows:

Each row is a set of values measured (or estimated) for a single site in a single year, so there are 16 (sites) x 4 (years) = 64 rows.

Each column is a set of values for one variable across all site-by-year rows, including site name, survey year, biodiversity measures, landscape variables, and survey information (e.g. number of survey hours).

Variables are as follows:

site = the name of the site at which data were collected

tot.native.bee.abundance = the abundance of...