Ants in the city: Can community gardens and citizen scientists help preserve insect biodiversity?

The global trend of urbanization presents a major threat to biodiversity. Currently, over 80% of the population of the United States lives in urban environments. Urbanization replaces natural habitat with a matrix of buildings, streets and parking lots, at best preserving only fragments of the native ecosystem in parks and urban green spaces. The maintenance of healthy insect communities is vital to the preservation of biodiversity as a whole in such habitat fragments, yet we still know very little about how insects utilize urban green spaces. As part of an ongoing collaboration between Lesley University and the Urban Ecology Institute, we sampled ant communities in urban forest reserves and community gardens in the Boston area along with a team of high school educators and students. We correlated overall biodiversity and the abundance of native/invasive species with community garden characteristics, including distance to and connectivity with larger reserves. We also evaluated the quality of species data collected by citizen scientists. Results and impacts of this study are discussed in light of future planned efforts to engage educators and students in the preservation of insect biodiversity and  urban green spaces.