Rich and abundant spider communities result from enhanced web capture breadth and reduced overlap in urban greenspaces.

摘要: Urbanization is a key contributor to biodiversity loss, but evidence mounting that cities can support rich arthropod communities, including rare and threatened species. Furthermore, greenspace growing within hundreds of "shrinking cities" have lost population resulting in need demolish an overabundance infrastructure creating vacant land. Efforts are underway transform lots, often viewed as blighted areas, into habitats promote generate ecosystem services, such urban agroecosystems. To understand how reconfiguring these greenspaces might influence species conservation, elucidation the factors drive distribution pool needed. In particular, importance interactions structuring communities poorly understood. We tested hypotheses (1) greater breadth prey captured by web-building spiders reduced overlap capture among individuals facilitates conservation genera richness abundance (2) heterogeneity patch enhanced dietary niche resource partitioning. 2013 2014, abundance, degree sheet web (Linyphiidae) was measured using mimic traps at 160 microsites (0.25 m2 ) situated four lots farms city Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Within subset 40 microsites, we used vacuum sampling hand collection measure Linyphiidae. Spider were significantly relative lots. The explained habitat structure, with dominated tall grasses flowering plants, high bloom richness, supporting higher spiders. bare ground. These findings illustrate efforts focus on reducing ground incorporating diversity plant linyphiid spiders, potentially relaxing exploitative competition for shared prey.