Urban landscapes with more natural greenspace support higher pollinator diversity

As cities around the world expand, we urgently need to better understand the drivers of urban biodiversity, especially for functionally important groups such as insect pollinators. In this study, we gathered hoverfly and bumble bee pollinator observations from natural history collections and community science initiatives from 462 urban landscapes across 85 U.S. metropolitan areas. We tested whether urban greenspace functions as pollinator habitat by examining whether the total area of greenspace in an urban landscape predicted pollinator occurrence, i.e., the presence or absence of species in a landscape. Our study was designed to determine whether there were differences between natural greenspace area (i.e., urban greenbelts, nature reserves and forest/grassland fragments) and developed greenspace area (i.e., managed parks, cemeteries and golf courses) in their ability to support a diversity of pollinator species. After accounting for sampling biases using an integrated occupancy model..., In this study, we used publicly available data on urban land cover and urban socioeconomics and estimated their associations with urban pollinator occurrence rate. The publicly available urban land coverand urban socioeconomic data are large (continental scale) spatial files. The orginial sources for the spatial land cover and socioeconomic data are cited in the manuscript. We provide the site-specific land cover and socioeconomic predictor values that were derived from the publicly accessible data in a table - \"site_data.csv\". We focused on two groups of pollinator species - hoverflies (family Syrphidae) and bumble bees (family Apidae, genus Bombus). Pollinator detections were obtained from GBIF for hoverflies, and from the Bumble Bees of North America Database for bumble bees. The GBIF data request is cited in the README and in the manuscript text. The full Bumble Bees of North America Database data set is available upon request from the original provider, also cited in the README and..., , # Urban landscapes with more natural greenspace support higher pollinator diversity

Updated December 11, 2024, by Jens Ulrich.

## Data

The following data files are provided in the Dryad repository:

* syrphidae_nativity.csv - information about hoverfly nativity. The \"species\" column contains character data on species names. The \"nativity\" column indicates whether species are non-native (nativity == 0). All hoverfly species not included in this list were considered to be native. 
* site_data.xlsx - these are site-specific predictors derived from publicly available land use and socioeconomic data (see citations below). These data are generated under the landscape definitions for our main analysis presented in the manuscript: landscape size of 10km by 10km, filtering out landscapes with less than 1,200 people / km^2.

**Site-level land cover and socioeconomic data (site_data.xlsx)** were derived from the following public datasets from the following databases: the U.S. National Land Cove...