Biogeographic patterns in below-ground diversity in New York City's Central Park are similar to those observed globally

Abstract

Soil biota play key roles in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, however, compared to our knowledge of above-ground plant and animal diversity, the biodiversity found in soils remains largely uncharacterized. Here, we present an assessment of soil biodiversity and biogeographic patterns across Central Park in New York City that spanned all three domains of life, demonstrating that even an urban, managed system harbours large amounts of undescribed soil biodiversity. Despite high variability across the Park, below-ground diversity patterns were predictable based on soil characteristics, with prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities exhibiting overlapping biogeographic patterns. Further, Central Park soils harboured nearly as many distinct soil microbial phylotypes and types of soil communities as we found in biomes across the globe (including arctic, tropical and desert soils). This integrated cross-domain investigation highlights that the amount and patterning of novel and uncharacterized diversity at a single urban location matches that observed across natural ecosystems spanning multiple biomes and continents.

Urban stress is associated with variation in microbial species composition—but not richness—in Manhattan

“…Similar results have been found in Central Park where microbial eukaryotes but not bacteria and archaea were a subset of the global population (Ramirez et al, 2014). Additionally, on treetop 'islands' macro-and meso-fauna diversity tended to decrease with reductions in habitat size, whereas microbial diversity did not (Wardle et al, 2003).…”

“…The imperfect overlap between parks and medians in composition may be due to differences in the microhabitat of these sites and the novel microhabitats and resources present in medians, including those associated with pollution, such that a significant number of bacterial taxa (420%) were only present in medians. Interestingly, while Ramirez et al (2014) documented an elevated abundance of pathogens in Central Park relative to a global data set, we did not find a concomitant difference in abundance between parks and medians. Medians (and, in our data set, parks) are unlike indoor environments, which are dominated by human-associated microbes (Lax et al, 2014).…”

“…Ramirez et al (2014) recently found similar diversity of bacteria in a global data set as what they found in the soil of Central Park. Barberán et al (2015) also found that the microbes present in dust in cities were no less diverse than those in samples from outside of cities.…”

Evaluating community–environment relationships along fine to broad taxonomic resolutions reveals evolutionary forces underlying community assembly

“…Sequence-based prokaryotic community data sets We used eight data sets: (1) Lauber 'America-Soils' study (Lauber et al, 2009) (referred to as case #1 hereafter), (2) Chu 'Arctic-Soils' study (Chu et al, 2010) (referred to as case #2 hereafter), (3) Ramirez 'NYpark-Soils' study (Ramirez et al, 2014) (referred to as case #3 hereafter), (4) Zarraonaindia 'NYfarmSoils' study (Zarraonaindia et al, 2015) (referred to as case #4 hereafter), (5) Sunagawa 'TaraSur-Seawaters' study (Sunagawa et al, 2015) (referred to as case #5 hereafter), (6) Sunagawa 'TaraChl-Seawaters' study (Sunagawa et al, 2015) (referred to as case #6 hereafter), (7) Gilbert 'WEC-Seawaters' study (Gilbert et al, 2012) (referred to as case #7 hereafter) and (8) Yeh 'SECS-Seawaters' study (Yeh et al, 2015) (referred to as case #8 hereafter) to test our theoretical framework regarding how the strength of communityenvironment relationships varies with changes in taxonomic resolution (Figure 1). We summarize the characteristics of these sequence-based prokaryotic community data sets in Table 1.…”

Genome reduction in an abundant and ubiquitous soil bacterium ‘Candidatus Udaeobacter copiosus’

“…For example, more than 120,000 unique bacterial and archaeal taxa were found in surface soils of Central Park in New York City, of which only ∼15% had 16S rRNA gene sequences matching those contained in reference databases and <1% had representative genome sequence information 1 . This undescribed soil microbial diversity is not evenly distributed across the tree of life.…”