Can patterns of urban biodiversity be predicted using simple measures of green infrastructure?

Urban species and habitats provide important ecosystem services such as summertime cooling, recreation, and pollination at a variety of scales. Many studies have assessed how biodiversity responds to urbanization, but little work has been done to try and create recommendations that can be easily applied to urban planning, design and management practice. Urban planning often operates at broad spatial scales, typically using relatively simplistic targets for land cover mix to influence biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Would more complicated, but still easily created, prescriptions for urban vegetation be beneficial? Here we assess the importance of vegetation measures (percentage vegetation cover, tree canopy cover and variation in canopy height) across four taxonomic groups (bats, bees, hoverflies and birds) at multiple spatial scales (100, 250, 500, 1000 m) within a major urban area (Birmingham, the United Kingdom). We found that small-scale (100–250-m radius) measures of vegetation were important predictors for hoverflies and bees, and that bats were sensitive to vegetation at a medium spatial-scale (250–500 m). In contrast, birds responded to vegetation characteristics at both small (100 m) and large (1000 m) scales. Vegetation cover, tree cover and variation in canopy height were expected to decrease with built surface cover; however, only vegetation height showed this expected trend. The results indicate the importance of relatively small patches of vegetation cover for supporting urban biodiversity, and show that relatively simple measures of vegetation characteristics can be useful predictors of species richness (or activity density, in the case of bats). They also highlight the danger of relying upon percentage built surface cover as an indicator of urban biodiversity potential

Assembly of forest communities across East Asia – insights from phylogenetic community structure and species pool scaling

Local communities are assembled from larger-scale species pools via dispersal, environmental filtering, biotic interactions, and local stochastic demographic processes. The relative importance, scaling and interplay of these assembly processes can be elucidated by comparing local communities to variously circumscribed species pools. Here we present the first study applying this approach to forest tree communities across East Asia, focusing on community phylogenetic structure and using data from a global network of tropical, subtropical and temperate forest plots. We found that Net Relatedness Index (NRI) and Nearest Taxon Index (NTI) values were generally lower with geographically broad species pools (global and Asian species pools) than with an East Asian species pool, except that global species pool produced higher NTI than the East Asian species pool. The lower NRI for the global relative to the East Asian species pool may indicate an important role of intercontinental migration during the Neogene and Quaternary and climatic conservatism in shaping the deeper phylogenetic structure of tree communities in East Asia. In contrast, higher NTI for the global relative to the East Asian species pool is consistent with recent localized diversification determining the shallow phylogenetic structure