EDI Development Environment
Wildlife communities are structured by numerous ecological filters in cities that influence their populations, and some species even manage to thrive in urban landscapes. CAP researchers were the first to observe “the luxury effect”, the hypothesis that biodiversity is positively related to income of residents. The luxury effect is still being tested worldwide twenty years later and has led to important new research on other socio-demographic factors that shape biodiversity but are vastly understudied, such as race and ethnicity, as well as the interaction of these factors with urban structural inequalities that may be hidden by income. This research aims to unpack the luxury effect by considering other landscape and socio-demographic factors that may influence wildlife communities across neighborhoods of metro Phoenix. Specifically, we are investigating if neighborhood income and ethnicity independently influence mammal occupancy in neighborhoods across the CAP ecosystem. To answer this question, we leveraged a wildlife camera array across CAP within community parks, in which cameras are placed across a gradient of average median household income and percent Latinx of residents. Incorporating socioeconomic data into urban mammal research will allow for the advancement in the understanding of socio-ecological patterns.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
