Global relationships between body size and urban affinity across more than 30,000 plant and animal species

To test whether there is a consistent pattern of body size filtering associated with urban affinity across the tree of life, we integrated our species-level urban affinity values with body size measures collated from the literature. We first evaluated the overall relationship between body size and urban affinity across all taxa, fitting two models (see Methods for details). These included 48 animal families (17% of animal families) and 35 plant families (38% of plant families), indicating that for most families, body size does not consistently predict urban affinity. https://cdn.elifesciences.org/articles/109047/elife-109047-fig3-data2-v1.zip Download elife-109047-fig3-data2-v1.zipThe variability in both the direction and strength of urban body size filtering across taxa likely reflects the diversity of urban stressors and the contrasting taxon-specific pathways through which body size mediates sensitivity to them. Ultimately, the heterogeneous and sometimes weak relationships between body size and urban affinity suggest that body size alone cannot explain the emergence of extreme urban exploiters and the skewed shape of SUDs.