Dataset to: Ecology and temporal dynamics of urban Drosophila species communities as potential indicators of biodiversity decline

Understanding the impact of ecological factors on biodiversity is central in the context of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss. Urban areas, as landscapes under particularly strong anthropogenic influence, are undergoing rapid ecological change, yet the consequences for urban biodiversity and ecosystem functioning remain poorly understood. In this study, we focused on fruit flies of the genus Drosophila - a diverse group of dipterans with variable ecological niches and degrees of synanthropy - to investigate species composition and community ecology in the metropolitan area of Vienna, Austria. With the help of numerous citizen scientists, we have collected approximately 18,000 specimens through dense spatio-temporal sampling both indoors and outdoors of human dwellings. A total of 13 Drosophila species were identified, with communities dominated by widespread cosmopolitan synanthropic species. Among these, D. mercatorum and D. virilis represent novel records for Austria. Comparisons to a previous study from more than 30 years ago revealed that the species richness in Vienna was more than 50% lower than before and showed that formerly common species were potentially replaced by neobiots. We further assessed ecological niches by intersecting species abundance data with high-dimensional, high-resolution earth observation datasets, which revealed distinct ecological preferences among species. In particular, the neozoan D. mercatorum emerged as a highly synanthropic species, tightly confined to urban areas with high levels of imperviousness. In summary, our study underpins the versatility of the Drosophila system as indicators of biodiversity loss in a rapidly changing world.

This dataset contains the raw abundance data of the observed species, as well as point data and gridded datasets of eorth observartion data used for ecological inference.

This directory contains GeoTIFF files with Earth observation data for the Vienna City Fly project. Files containing "yearly" were obtained from https://data.hub.geosphere.at/dataset/spartacus-v2-1q-1km and are projected in EPSG:31256.All other datasets are projected in WGS 84 and were obtained from various sources. For detailed dataset descriptions and sources, see Metadata.csv.

The file called AbundanceData.csv contains Coordinates, sampling dates, species counts, and environmental factors for all samples included in the dataset.