Reclaiming urban vacant land to manage stormwater and support insect habitat

Urban green spaces can provide important wildlife habitat and ecosystem services. In legacy cities, built structures are demolished as populations dwindle, resulting in vacant land. Vacant land constitutes an opportunity to establish green infrastructure that provides multiple ecosystem services. Our objective was to determine whether establishing green infrastructure on vacant land to manage stormwater could provide insect habitat in the legacy city of Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. Two green infrastructure treatments were implemented on vacant land in the historic Slavic Village neighborhood in 2014 and 2015: rain gardens (lower cost) and bioswales (higher cost). We hypothesized that rain gardens and bioswales would support more abundant, species rich insect communities compared to unaltered vacant lots. Wild bees (Hymenoptera: Aculeata) and lady beetles (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae), two insect groups of conservation concern, were sampled during the summer (June–August) from 2014 to 2016 usin..., Pan traps were set in 2014 (July 10, July 31), 2015 (June 9, July 6, Aug 5), and 2016 (June 9, July 26, Aug 8) to sample bees. Pan traps consisted of 96 ml plastic soufflé bowls (Solo®) painted fluorescent blue, yellow, or left white. One pan trap of each color was filled halfway with soapy water (1% blue Dawn dish soap/water solution) and deployed at ground level for 24 h in each quadrat used for vegetation sampling. At the time of collection, the number of viable pan traps per site was recorded to account for trap loss during each sampling. All bees from pan traps were washed, blown dry, pinned, and preserved with museum level archival labels. Bees collected using pan traps were identified using Discoverlife.org (Ascher and Pickering 2017), revisions by Jason Gibbs for Lasioglossum (Gibbs 2011; Gibbs et al. 2013), and Bumble Bees of North America (Williams et al. 2014). Voucher specimen identifications were verified by Sam Droege at the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab in Laurel,..., , # Reclaiming urban vacant land to manage stormwater and support insect habitat

The dataset contents include count data, local vegetation variables, temporal variables, and site information. These data were used to create generalized linear models in R, using a backwards stepwise selection approach.

## Description of the data and file structure

The Excel spreadsheets are databases containing information about insect taxa we collected as well as the local vegetation variables, while the CSV files include information about insect abundance and diversity. The CSV files were brought into R for analysis. The data is structured according to time of sampling, site, and quadrat. You will find in some sites, we only sampled insects and vegetation from 4 quadrats, whereas in others, we sampled from up to 6 quadrats. This was to account for variation in size, as well as variation in cover. For example, in the rain gardens, we placed additional sampling equipment in the mulched depression. Note...