Conservation in post-industrial cities: how does vacant land management and landscape configuration influence urban bees?

1. Rich pollinator assemblages are documented in some cities despite habitat fragmentation and degradation, suggesting that urban areas have potential as pollinator refuges. To inform urban bee conservation, we assessed local and landscape scale drivers of bee community composition and foraging within vacant lots of Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Cleveland is a shrinking city, a type of urban area that has an over-abundance of vacated greenspaces as a result of population loss and subsequent demolition of abandoned infrastructure. As such, Cleveland represents over 350 post-industrial cities worldwide, that are all promising locations for bee conservation.

2. Across a network of 56 residential vacant lots (each ~30m x 12m), we established seven unique habitats, including seeded native prairies, to investigate how vegetation management and landscape context at a 1500m radius influenced urban bee communities. We assessed the distribution of several bee functional traits, diversity, and abundanc...