Urban Parks Home to Biodiverse Soil Microbes

We all know that there are many social, environmental, and economic benefits to preserving green spaces within the city. But we are still learning how important these benefits are, in some cases, many years after these parks were initially established. In 1853, the state legislature of New York voted to purchase over 700 acres of land in central Manhattan. Then occupied with swamps and rocky outcroppings, this land would become one of the nation's first landscaped public spaces in the United States--now known as Central Park. Back then, New Yorkers just wanted a public space to ride their carriages and have an alternative activity to sitting with their family in a tavern. Today, Central Park has a variety of outdoor activities and is the most visited urban park in the nation. It also offers a wealthy array of urban diversity with  nearly 400 plant species and around 350 animal species. Kelly Ramirez, Netherlands Institute of  Ecology, did her postdoc work on the soil microbes of Central Park in 2014. She sampled nearly 600 soil locations, and compared the life found within these to other soil samples taken across the globe. According to her team, they found 122,081 bacterial, 1659 archaeal, and 43,429 eukaryotic phylotypes (phylotypes are single-celled organisms that are difficult to identify). This stunning amount of soil biodiversity was unexpected, and shows that this urban oasis is on par with tropical regions, the Arctic, and the desert. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the authors state that most of the phylotypes were previously undescribed, and only 16.2 % of their genetic sequences showed in the Greengene database. They stated in their paper (2014) that "the broad range of cover types and management practices (fertilizer, compost, mulching, irrigation) within the Park allowed us to examine the factors structuring soil communities across environmental gradients while holding climatic conditions nearly constant." So the diverse areas of the park that includes wetlands, woodlands and managed garden spaces creates a diverse soil biota. The case for urban biodiversity may very well be found under our own feet.