Planting native wildflowers improves vacant land as bee habitat in a post-industrial city

As people leave post-industrial cities, abandoned homes are demolished and transformed into vacant lots. These greenspaces have been demonstrated to provide habitat for urban wildlife and supply ecosystem services to communities. In the post-industrial city of Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., approximately 37% of the state’s bee fauna has been collected within vacant lots.
Our goal was to determine if planting native wildflowers (“pocket prairies”) on vacant land would improve these sites as bee habitat. We hypothesized that pocket prairies would support a greater proportion of the regional bee species pool, represented by Metropark grassland bee communities in the suburban landscape, compared to unaltered vacant lots. Using pan traps and hand vacuums, we sampled bees in each treatment from June to September 2019.
We collected 1,087 bees representing 24 genera and 81 species. Bees visited over 30 floral species, including native wildflowers and urban spontaneous vegetation. Metropark grasslands..., Local bloom assessment  
Bloom assessments occurred monthly in 2019 (June 11, July 10, August 6, September 17). In the center of each pocket prairie and vacant lot, we created a 7 × 15m grid, randomly selected six 1m2 grid quadrats, and placed a 0.5m2 PVC pipe square in the center of each quadrat. We identified every unique flowering species present in a quadrat to calculate bloom richness. Then, we counted all floral units to determine bloom abundance of each flowering species (Turo et al., 2021). Afterwards, we took five random measurements (mm2) of individual floral units for each species. Average bloom size per species was calculated and multiplied by bloom abundance to quantify total bloom area at a site. In each Metropark grassland, we established a 20m transect, randomly selected six 1m2 grid quadrats to sample along the transect and placed a 0.5m2 PVC pipe square in each quadrat’s center wherein the same bloom data were collected.  
Bee sampling
We used pan traps to assess the b..., , # Planting native wildflowers improves vacant land as bee habitat in a post-industrial city

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

## Description of the data and file structure

In June-August 2019, we used pan traps to assess the bee community present throughout the season in urban vacant lots, pocket prairies, and surrounding Metropark grasslands in the greater Cleveland metropolitan area. We sampled bees once a month in each treatment (June 11, July 10, August 6, August 12, September 17, September 19). Pan traps were plastic souffle cups (3.25 oz; Solo© Dart Container Corporation, Mason, Michigan, U.S.A.) 2/3 full of 1% dish soap solution (Blue Dawn© Proctor and Gamble, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A.) painted fluorescent blue, white, or yellow (© Guerra Paint & Pigment Corp.). Pan traps were deployed at prairie flower height on 1m elevated stands which consisted of a 15 × 20cm corrugated plastic platform secured to an L-bracket and fixed to...