Journal article
Increasing biodiversity in urban green spaces through simple vegetation interventions
CG Threlfall, L Mata, JA Mackie, AK Hahs, NE Stork, NSG Williams, SJ Livesley
Journal of Applied Ecology | WILEY | Published : 2017
Abstract
Cities are rapidly expanding world-wide and there is an increasing urgency to protect urban biodiversity, principally through the provision of suitable habitat, most of which is in urban green spaces. Despite this, clear guidelines of how to reverse biodiversity loss or increase it within a given urban green space is lacking. We examined the taxa- and species-specific responses of five taxonomically and functionally diverse animal groups to three key attributes of urban green space vegetation that drive habitat quality and can be manipulated over time: the density of large native trees, volume of understorey vegetation and percentage of native vegetation. Using multi-species occupancy-detect..
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Awarded by Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Australian Research Council (LP110100686), the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and the Australian Golf Course Superintendents Association, who also provided invaluable logistics support. We would like to thank our volunteers for field assistance, and participating residents, municipalities and golf courses for granting access to their properties. The authors are grateful to the Associate Editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments. We also thank Bob Carpenter for his invaluable help specifying our model in the Stan modelling language and to Mallik Malipatil, Ken Walker and Melinda Moir for their invaluable assistance with heteropteran bug and native bee species identification. L.M. acknowledges funding from the National Environmental Science Programme - Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), and A.K.H. from The Baker Foundation.