Bang_2011_Landscape-and-Urban-Planning.pdf

V a C a b a A R R A A K A D M P R U 1 i g f m 2 u b a a t a t o ( 0 dLandscape and Urban Planning 103 (2011) 383– 399 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Landscape and Urban Planning jou rn al h om epa ge: www.elsev ier .com/ locate / landurbplan ariation in arthropod communities in response to urbanization: Seven years of rthropod monitoring in a desert city hristofer Banga,?, Stanley H. Faethb School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-4501, USA Department of Biology, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170, USA r t i c l e i n f o rticle history: eceived 27 April 2011 eceived in revised form 17 August 2011 ccepted 24 August 2011 vailable online 5 October 2011 eywords: rthropods iversity onitoring recipitation emnant rbanization a b s t r a c t Continuous monitoring is essential to understand dynamics of biological communities in response to urbanization, and to provide guidance in landscape planning for conserving urban biodiversity. Arthro- pods serve this purpose because they are abundant and diverse in urban areas, and relatively easy to collect. Over seven years, in the Central Arizona Phoenix area, arthropod communities in three urban habitat categories were collected and compared to arthropods in natural desert using pitfall traps and non-parametric analyses. First, we tested for differences in arthropod composition, abundances, and diversity across habitats and years. Second, we examined how conclusions about arthropod diversity vary with level of taxonomic resolution. We found that arthropod community composition varied among the four habitats at all taxonomic levels tested. In particular, urban mesic habitats had generally lower diversity than natural desert habitats, although with some exceptions. In contrast, mesic habitats had hi