Building biodiversity in neighbourhood parks in Bangalore city, India: Ordinary yet essential.

Cities comprise of mixed green patches that vary in size and are highly scattered and disconnected. Although small green spaces largely dominate the cityscape, they are often neglected and ignored by the naturalists and conservationists, as they do not fulfill the large green spaces criteria. The citizens on the other hand seem to have a different perception and requirements from small green spaces as they are within their neighbourhood. Bangalore, a developing city within South India, consists of a large number of newly formed residential areas which have pocket green spaces in the form of neighbourhood parks (henceforth NPs). They are maintained by the municipality and are mainly designed for recreation purposes, completely neglecting the fact that these spaces could be essential for biodiversity. Here, there is a disconnect between the requirements of the citizens, conservationists and the end product that the municipality delivers. Here, through a questionnaire survey we assess the biodiversity citizens are fond off, and use them as surrogate taxa for the not so immediately obvious taxa, insects to enumerate the biodiversity within NPs. We analyze and identify landscape characteristics around NPs which could enhance the biodiversity within NPs. Our results reveal that people are fond of Birds and Butterflies and we use them as surrogates for the inconspicuous taxa to assess biodiversity within NPs. 55 tree species, 45 species of birds, 41 species of butterflies and 68 morpho species of insects were recorded. We demonstrate that small green spaces are critical systems and help support biodiversity across three scale within the city. Interestingly, results suggests that density of NPs is more important rather than the size of NPs. Also, the presence of high density of NPs within a neighbourhood could support similar biodiversity that large green spaces support. Finally, this study provides insights on the landscape matrix that could help enhance biodiversity support service within NPs and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Diversity matters: Effects of density compensation in pollination service during rainfall shift.

Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency due to the warming climate. Such extremities can jeopardize ecosystem services and create economic imbalances. Tropical developing countries are predicted to suffer the maximum consequences of such events.We examined the impact of such an event-extreme rainfall fluctuation-on a critical ecosystem service-pollination, which can be intricately linked to a country's economy. We performed this study in a dominant peri-urban vegetable hub of an agriculture-dependent developing country.We found that the yield of all pollinator-dependent crops grown across a large spatial scale (district) over multiple years (six) drastically declined with the decrease in rainfall.At the local scale, we found that the dominant crop (representative horticultural crop) had a significant drop in yield during drought, likely due to the production of fewer female flowers and a significant shift in the pollinator community.We found that Trigona sp. (one of the four pollinators) was the critical pollinator positively influencing fruit-to-flower ratio (FFR) (an indicator of pollination service) in the normal rainfall year. However, despite its sharp decline during drought, the FFR remained unaffected. We found that during drought, Apis dorsata was crucial in maintaining FFR and compensated for the decline of the critical pollinator across 67% farmlands.Our study demonstrates the role of ecosystem stabilizing mechanism rescuing the crucial ecosystem service during climatic variability over the temporal scale.