Assembly processes and environmental drivers of soil microbial communities across urban green space

Abstract

Urban green space (UGS) plays a crucial role in maintaining ecological biodiversity and enhancing sustainability of urban ecosystems. Urban soilbiota is vital for ecosystem functioning, yet microbial structure and assembly processes under human activities remain poorly understood. This study investigated soil microbial communities using high-throughput sequencing among four UGS types (FOREST, WETLA, BUILT, and ROAD). These results suggested that bacterial Shannon and Chao1 indices in FOREST were significantly lower than other UGS types (8.49% and 27.42%, respectively; P<0.05). Fungal Ascomycota was lower in FOREST than in others, while Thaumarchaeota was the dominant archaeal phylum among four UGS types. In this study, FOREST showed a more complex co-occurrence network (15.69% more nodes and 3.34 times more edges), potentially indicating more intricate species interactions. Concurrently, we also found that only bacterial community in FOREST was governed by homogeneous selection, whereas that in BUILT was unaffected by dispersal limitation. Besides, Gaiella was significantly positively correlated with soil pH and phosphorus contents, but Acidothermus was positively related to soil carbon and nitrogen contents. Our findings provide preliminary insights for the scientific planning and sustainable management of UGS.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

urban green space / microbial community / assembly processes / soil properties

Highlight

	● FOREST showed lower bacterial and fungal α-diversity than other green spaces.
	● FOREST showed higher complexity and stability of microbial networks.
	● Only bacterial community in FOREST was affected by homogeneous selection.
	● Only bacterial community in BUILT was unaffected by dispersal limitation.

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