Large parks and city-wide tree cover boost butterfly diversity across 22 major U.S. cities

Accelerating global urbanization necessitates a better understanding of how to manage cities that promote biodiversity. However, we currently lack multi-year, multi-city studies, which limits a generalizable understanding of how both within and between city differences impact the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban biodiversity. Here, we tested hypotheses about the drivers of butterfly diversity within and across urban parks by applying Bayesian occupancy models to five years of iNaturalist community science data from 2,550 parks in 22 major U.S. cities. We found that cities with bigger parks supported more species per park, including more disturbance- and edge-avoidant species. This was