Urban Garden Bee and Wasp Interaction Networks from Zurich

2015 data from 85 allotment and home gardens in Zurich supports research on trophic interaction diversity. It includes host-natural enemy interaction networks, network metrics, and explanatory variables like urban intensity, temperature, and habitat amount. The dataset is part of the BetterGardens project and was published by ENVIDAT.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between urban intensity and network metrics for cavity-nesting bee and wasp communities.
• Model the effect of temperature and habitat amount on alpha and beta trophic interaction diversity.
• Correlate garden management intensity from questionnaire data with the structure of host-natural enemy networks.
• Study the composition of natural enemy communities associated with cavity-nesting bees and wasps in urban settings.

Strengths

• Data from 85 distinct garden sites provides a solid sample for urban ecological analysis.
• Includes both interaction network data and multiple explanatory variables (urban intensity, temperature, habitat amount, management).
• Comes with supporting R scripts for reproducibility of the original analyses.

Limitations

• Single-year sampling (2015) limits analysis of temporal trends or long-term effects.
• Geographic scope is limited to the city of Zurich, which may not represent other urban environments.
• Sample size of gardens is known, but the underlying row count for interactions is unspecified.

Provenance

Source

ENVIDAT, associated with the BetterGardens project.

Collection Method

Sampled using standardized trapnests in selected gardens.

Time Range

2015

Freshness

Data reflects a 2015 collection, last updated in the repository in 2023.

Geography

85 allotment and home gardens in the city of Zurich, Switzerland.