Abstract
Urban greenspaces are a haven for wildlife in densely populated cities. Wildlife use greenspaces for resource acquisition, shelter, and traveling across urbanized landscapes. Greenspace characteristics such as presence of woody or herbaceous landcover, size, edge density, and patchiness influence species richness. The goals of this study was to: 1) identify and quantify greenspace metrics to determine relationships with wildlife and 2) determine differences in greenspace patterns at various spatial scales. To monitor wildlife, twenty-six camera traps were set in eastern Los Angeles County, California; greenspace metrics were gathered using 3m land cover supervised classification. We used a generalized linear mixed model to determine the influence of greenspace metrics on richness at four scales (200m, 500m, 1km, and 2km). At larger scales, 1km and 2km, high herbaceous cover, whether as increasing aggregated patches or increased patchiness, and moderate levels of woody cover positively influence species richness. At smaller scales, 200m and 500m, low to moderate levels of herbaceous cover and high levels of woody cover strongly and positively influence species. These results suggest that wildlife are able to utilize urban areas with increasing fragmentation of greenspace habitat and require greenspace, either as a few, less fragmented patches or as many patches with high herbaceous cover in the urban matrix. From the perspective of urban planning, developing greenspaces from a broader ecological scale is important to ensure they function as stepping stones in the urban matrix. Understanding these patterns can improve greenspaces that support wildlife and therefore, ecological functions.