What landscape processes structure insect biodiversity?
Insect communities across and within the urban matrix
Landscape characteristics can moderate patterns of biodiversity, population dynamics, and the selection of functional traits within a community (Tschartnke et al. 2010).
How does landscape configuration and composition affect insect diversity? Does taxonomic identity and functional mobility influence these patterns?
Working with several collaborators, I’ve examined lady beetle, spider, and bee diversity within urban landscape matrices. For some taxa (i.e., lady beetles), increasing urbanization can cause decreased richness and abundance (Gardiner et al. 2021, Parker et al. 2020, Perry et al. 2024). For others, (i.e., spiders) habitat fragmentation can increase functional dissimilarity and taxonomic diversity, enabling spatially explicit functional communities across the urban landscape (Delgado de la Flor et al. 2020).
Urban greenspaces, like this vacant lot, can form habitat corridors enabling bee dispersal from larger patches Turo and Gardiner 2019
We expect that certain functional traits enable some taxa to succeed in cities but that urbanization filters insect communities at a landscape scale. Work continues on exploring the community assembly of bee functional traits across urban to rural gradients (Pham et al. submitted, Shepard et al. in prep).
Coccinella novemnotata photo courtesy of MaLisa Spring