Whitehead James, Roy Julien, Hempel Stefan, Rillig Matthias C
Ecology of Plants, Institut für Biologie, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Berlin-Brandenburg Institute of Advanced Biodiversity Research (BBIB), Berlin, Germany.
Front Microbiol. 2022 Aug 12;13:972052. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2022.972052. eCollection 2022.
The microbial communities inhabiting urban soils determine the functioning of these soils, in regards to their ability to cycle nutrients and support plant communities. In an increasingly urbanized world these properties are of the utmost importance, and the microbial communities responsible are worthy of exploration. We used 53 grassland sites spread across Berlin to describe and explain the impacts of urbanity and other environmental parameters upon the diversity and community composition of four microbial groups. These groups were (i) the Fungi, with a separate dataset for (ii) the Glomeromycota, (iii) the Bacteria, and (iv) the protist phylum Cercozoa. We found that urbanity had distinct impacts on fungal richness, which tended to increase. Geographic distance between sites and soil chemistry, in addition to urbanity, drove microbial community composition, with site connectivity being important for Glomeromycotan communities, potentially due to plant host communities. Our findings suggest that many microbial species are well adapted to urban soils, as supported by an increase in diversity being a far more common result of urbanity than the reverse. However, we also found distinctly separate distributions of operational taxonomic unit (OTU)s from the same species, shedding doubt of the reliability of indicator species, and the use of taxonomy to draw conclusion on functionality. Our observational study employed an extensive set of sites across an urbanity gradient, in the region of the German capital, to produce a rich microbial dataset; as such it can serve as a blueprint for other such investigations.
城市土壤中的微生物群落决定了这些土壤的功能，这体现在它们循环养分和支持植物群落的能力上。在一个日益城市化的世界中，这些特性至关重要，而负责这些功能的微生物群落值得探索。我们利用分布在柏林的53个草地样点，来描述和解释城市化及其他环境参数对四类微生物群落多样性和群落组成的影响。这四类微生物分别是：(i) 真菌，其中 (ii) 球囊菌门有单独的数据集，(iii) 细菌，以及 (iv) 原生生物界的 Cercozoa 门。我们发现城市化对真菌丰富度有显著影响，真菌丰富度往往会增加。除城市化外，样点之间的地理距离和土壤化学性质驱动着微生物群落组成，样点连通性对球囊菌门群落很重要，这可能是由于植物宿主群落的原因。我们的研究结果表明，许多微生物物种能很好地适应城市土壤，因为城市化导致多样性增加是比多样性减少更为常见的结果。然而，我们还发现同一物种的可操作分类单元（OTU）分布明显不同，这让人对指示物种的可靠性以及利用分类学来推断功能产生怀疑。我们的观察性研究在德国首都地区沿着城市化梯度设置了大量样点，以生成丰富的微生物数据集；因此，它可以作为其他此类调查的蓝本。
