Urban Biodiversity Explorer

Use the search bar in the map to look for any US city. The app will plot species richness for the taxa selected by census tract as a fraction of the total species richness (for the same taxonomic group) observed in the county as a whole. Mouse over the map individual richness scores, scroll to zoom, drag to pan, ctrl+click to alter angle. In the side panel, the app will also plot social vulnerability indicators by quantile vs the species richness observed.

Adjust the filters to identify hotspots or coldspots

Errata

Source code: https://github.com/boettiger-lab/urban-biodiversity

Diego Ellis Soto & Carl Boettiger, 2025 BSD-2 License.

Datasets

Social Vulnerability Index data are drawn from the 2022 CDC tract-level data release, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/place-health/php/svi/index.html

GBIF species occurrence data derived from GBIF AWS snapshot 2024-10-01.

Redlined areas data derived from the Mapping Inequality Project