Data analysis
The abundance, species richness, and species diversity of vegetation,
butterflies, and birds found at each site were quantified as the number
of individuals, number of unique species, and Shannon index,
respectively. The butterfly, bird, and vegetation data were tested for
normality using the Shapiro-Wilk test and Q-Q plots, and tested for
homogeneity of variance using the Bartlett test and boxplots. If the
data met the parametric assumptions of normality and homogeneity, then
the Student’s t-test was used to compare urban and rural sites,
otherwise the Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used. Non-metric
multidimensional scaling (NMDS) was used to explore the differences in
community composition between rural and urban sites, with significant
differences tested using PERMANOVA. All analyses were performed using R
3.5.2 (R Core Team, 2021). Data were organised using the ‘tidyr ’
package (Wickham et al., 2019), graphs were created using
‘ggplot2 ’ (Wickham et al., 2019), ‘cowplot ’ (Wilke, 2019),
and ‘gridExtra ’ (Auguie, 2017), and diversity and ordination
analysis were performed with the ‘vegan ’ package (Oksanen et al.,
2019).