Small yet mighty; The design of roundabouts determines potential for biodiversity support in urban habitats: Data

This dataset is linked to an article to be published in Plants, People, Planet. The research aimed to identify how to best design roundabouts for microbial and plant biodiversity.

The dataset comprises:

• 1 README file
• 1 csv file of plant and bacterial communities alongside soil environmental data of 6 roundabouts
• 1 csv file of species matrix of plants with percentage cover for each site
• 30 fastq files of raw metagenomic sequence reads for each site, which have also been lodged with the NCBI under accession number PRJNA1178609

Legislation demands that wildlife habitat is implemented into urban areas as to tackle the biodiversity crisis. Crucial to the success of urban habitat is their design. Unlike other habitats, such as green rooves, roundabouts are understudied with little information available to local councils to design roundabouts with biodiversity in mind. We investigated the impact roundabout size and distance from the road has on roundabout plant and bacteria biodiversity.

We used vegetation surveys, metagenomics, trait and strategy analysis to understand how species richness may change between size classes and the reaction communities have to roundabout design.

We found that plant and bacteria species richness does not change between roundabout sizes. Plant biodiversity increased with roundabout size and distance from the road, whilst bacteria biodiversity experienced no such changes. Increases in roundabout size and distance from the road encouraged plant and bacteria communities less typical of urban habitats which were comprised of slower conservative species.

Results enable local councils to design roundabouts with plant and bacteria biodiversity in mind which has implications for how urban habitats can be used to mitigate the biodiversity crisis. Our final guidance to local councils is to prioritise roundabout size and distance from the road to support diverse communities non typical of urban habitats.