Urban Ecological Infrastructure (UEI) in the greater Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area and surrounding Sonoran desert region (2010-2017)

Urban ecological infrastructure (UEI) encompasses all infrastructure in a city that supports ecological structure and function, and by extension, provides ecosystem services to urban residents and is a broad, all-encompassing concept for "nature in cities". This idea includes commonly recognized forms of infrastructure, such as parks, residential yards, community gardens, lakes and rivers, and street trees. But UEI also includes less recognized forms, such as vacant lots, agricultural fields, canals, and water retention basins. Despite being widely recognized as important to urban landscapes, the wide variety, and various forms of urban ecological infrastructure are rarely documented in a single source. To address this, we consolidated various aquatic, terrestrial, and wetland UEI throughout the Phoenix Metropolitan area so researchers can incorporate this UEI into project designs and models. Since people’s perceptions of UEI differ not only by the three broad classifications but also by the individual characteristics of UEI, each feature is classified not only as aquatic, terrestrial, or wetlands but also given on of fifteen unique classifications. Incorporation of UEI into both planning and research design can promote practices that increase both biodiversity and human well-being while also possibly limiting negative landscape perceptions.