Insects in the city: Determinants of a contained aquatic microecosystem across an urbanized landscape

Cities can have profound impacts on ecosystems, yet our understanding of these impacts is currently limited. First, the effects of socioeconomic dimensions of human society are often overlooked. Second, correlative analyses are common, limiting our causal understanding of mechanisms. Third, most research has focused on terrestrial systems, ignoring aquatic systems that also provide important ecosystem services. Here we compare the effects of human population density and low-income prevalence on the macroinvertebrate communities and ecosystem processes within water-filled artificial tree holes. We hypothesized that these human demographic variables would affect tree holes in different ways via changes in temperature, water nutrients, and the local tree hole environment. We recruited community scientists across Greater Vancouver (Canada) to provide host trees and tend 50 tree holes over 14 weeks of colonization. We quantified tree hole ecosystems in terms of aquatic invertebrates, litter ..., These methods are quoted in abbreviated form from the original article [please also see README.md file for details on each script and data file, including description of every variable]:
We installed 73 artificial tree holes (hereafter tree holes) throughout Greater Vancouver, specifically the cities of Vancouver, Abbottsford, Burnaby, Chilliwack, Delta, Maple Ridge, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Port Moody, Richmond, Surrey, and West Vancouver. We constructed artificial tree holes from black plastic buckets (950 ml, height: 12.2cm, diameter:11.5cm). Near the rim, we drilled 1-cm holes for water overflow and covered these with 1mm mesh to prevent loss of insects and litter (Figure 2a). We attached each tree hole to a deciduous tree with a cable tie, about 1.3 m above ground, before adding leaf litter and bottled spring water. The leaf litter consisted of dried (60°C for two days) and pre-weighed Acer macrophyllum (Sapindaceae) leaves collected in November 2020, both loose (2.50 g) a..., R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22 ucrt)
Versions of R packages used are indicated at the end of archived R scripts under the comment #Session Info., # Title of Dataset:

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Data from: \"Insects in the city: Determinants of a contained aquatic microecosystem across an urbanized landscape\"\"

## Description of the Data and file structure

This readme file describes the (1) R scripts and (2) datafiles included in this repository. All scripts use R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22 ucrt) and detailed package information is found at the end of scripts under #Session Info. Missing data in data files are indicated as NA. All data files are in .csv format meaning that , is used as the separator.

## (1) Scripts

### 01\_invert\_biomass\_script.R:

this script converts invertebrate abundances into biomasses using the length:mass relationships and average per capit mass relationships embedded/predicted by the hellometry R package.
Input: inverts_clean.csv
Output: invert_biomass.csv

### 02\_data\_imputation\_compilation.R:

this script imputes some missing numeric environmental data, and then combines the full environmental dataset with invertebrate ...