Domestic gardens as favorable pollinator habitats in impervious landscapes

Urban expansion is correlated to negative biodiversity trends. The amount of impervious surfaces in urban areas is a determinant of pollinator species assemblages. While the increase in urbanization and impervious surfaces negatively impacts pollinators, cities also encompass urban green spaces, which have a significant capacity to support biodiversity. Among them, domestic gardens that represent a non-negligible fraction of green spaces have been shown to benefit pollinators. Domestic gardens may form habitat clusters in residential areas, although their value at a landscape scale is still unknown. Here, we investigate the combined effects of impervious surfaces and domestic garden areas on pollinator richness. Due to the difficulty of accessing privately owned domestic gardens, we chose to use citizen science data from a well-established French citizen science program known as SPIPOLL. Using regression tree analysis on buffers located from 50m to 1000m around the data points, we show the importance of pollinators being in close proximity to domestic gardens as locally favorable habitats that are embedded within a landscape, in which impervious surfaces represent unfavorable areas. We highlight the inter-connection between local and landscape scales, the potential for patches of domestic gardens in residential areas, and the need to consider the potential of gardeners coordinated management decisions within a landscape context.\n\nHighlightsO_LICitizen science provided access to domestic gardens, understudied urban green spaces\nC_LIO_LIImpervious surfaces limit pollinators presence at landscape level\nC_LIO_LISufficient critical amount of gardens increased pollinator diversity at local scale\nC_LIO_LICritical amount of gardens knowledge may favor coordinated decisions by gardeners\nC_LIO_LIPollinators may benefit from patches of domestic gardens in an urban matrix\nC_LI\n\n\n\nO_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=84 SRC=\"FIGDIR/small/374116_ufig1.gif\" ALT=\"Figure 1\">\nView larger version (42K):\norg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@116b7bforg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@799072org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@fa484eorg.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1a12db3_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG