A citizen science approach to evaluating US cities for biotic homogenization
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
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Abstract
Cities around the world have converged on structural and environmental characteristics that exert similar eco-evolutionary pressures on local communities. However, evaluating how urban biodiversity responds to urban intensification remains poorly understood because of the challenges in capturing the diversity of a range of taxa within and across multiple cities from different types of urbanization. Here we utilize a growing resource—citizen science data. We analyzed 66,209 observations representing 5,209 species generated by the City Nature Challenge project on the iNaturalist platform, in conjunction with remote sensing (NLCD2011) environmental data, to test for urban biotic homogenization at increasing levels of urban intensity across 14 metropolitan cities in the United States. Based on community composition analyses, we found that while similarities occur to an extent, urban biodiversity is often much more a reflection of the taxa living locally in a region. At the same time, the communities found in high intensity development were less explained by regional context than communities from other land cover types were. We also found that the most commonly observed species are often shared between cities and are non-endemic and/or have a distribution facilitated by humans. This study highlights the value of citizen science data in answering questions in urban ecology.
Cite this as
2019. A citizen science approach to evaluating US cities for biotic homogenization. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27472v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27472v2note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
This is an edited version of our paper after going through a first round of peer review. We added a new analysis that better gets at answering our question of biotic homogenization, and removed a section with overly complicated metrics that didn't.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Misha Leong conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Michelle D Trautwein contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
Funding
This work was supported by NSF DEB 1257960, the Doolin Foundation for Biodiversity, and the Schlinger Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
