Plant-Insect Ecosystems
Student Competition 10-Minute Paper
Caralee Shepard
Graduate Student
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
Sarah B. Scott
Graduate Student
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
Kayla I. Perry
Kent State University
Orrville, Ohio
Katherine Turo
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Frances S. Sivakoff
Assistant Professor
Ohio State University
Marion, Ohio
Mary Margaret Gardiner
Professor and Graduate Studies Chair
The Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio is a legacy city with abundant habitat in the form of vacant lots, which supports a species rich bee community. These vacant lots are often targeted for greening initiatives such as urban agriculture or wildlife gardens of native plants. However, not all bee species known to occur in from Northeast Ohio are found within these greenspaces. Functional traits, such as body size and lecty, may influence how a bee species reacts to different stressors present in the urban environment. Using five years of bee collections from Cleveland vacant lots, we examined how the functional trait diversity of Cleveland’s bee community differed from what was expected based on random chance, given the regional pool of bee species. We found that the species living in Cleveland’s vacant lots were more functionally similar than expected based on the regional species pool of Northern Ohio, even across habitat types, suggesting that urban filters for bee species work at a landscape level, rather than working at individual habitats.