Urban greenspaces and nearby natural areas support similar levels of soil ecosystem services
Eldridge, David J.; Cui, Haiying; Ding, Jingyi; Berdugo, Miguel; Saez-Sandino, Tadeo; Duran, Jorge; Gaitan, Juan J.; Blanco-Pastor, Jose L.; Rodriguez, Alexandra; Plaza, Cesar; Alfaro, Fernando; Teixido, Alberto L.; Abades, Sebastian; Bamigboye, Adebola R.; Penaloza-Bojaca, Gabriel F.; Grebenc, Tine; Nahberger, Tine U.; Illan, Javier G.; Liu, Yu-Rong; Makhalanyane, Thulani Peter; Rey, Ana; Siebe, Christina; Sun, Wei; Trivedi, Pankaj; Verma, Jay Prakash; Wang, Ling; Wang, Jianyong; Wang, Tianxue; Zaady, Eli; Zhou, Xiaobing; Zhou, Xin-Quan; Delgado-Baquerizo, Manuel
Date:
2024-03
Abstract:
Greenspaces are important for sustaining healthy urban environments and their human populations. Yet their capacity to support multiple ecosystem services simultaneously (multiservices) compared with nearby natural ecosystems remains virtually unknown. We conducted a global field survey in 56 urban areas to investigate the influence of urban greenspaces on 23 soil and plant attributes and compared them with nearby natural environments. We show that, in general, urban greenspaces and nearby natural areas support similar levels of soil multiservices, with only six of 23 attributes (available phosphorus, water holding capacity, water respiration, plant cover, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), and arachnid richness) significantly greater in greenspaces, and one (available ammonium) greater in natural areas. Further analyses showed that, although natural areas and urban greenspaces delivered a similar number of services at low (>25% threshold) and moderate (>50%) levels of functioning, natural systems supported significantly more functions at high (>75%) levels of functioning. Management practices (mowing) played an important role in explaining urban ecosystem services, but there were no effects of fertilisation or irrigation. Some services declined with increasing site size, for both greenspaces and natural areas. Our work highlights the fact that urban greenspaces are more similar to natural environments than previously reported and underscores the importance of managing urban greenspaces not only for their social and recreational values, but for supporting multiple ecosystem services on which soils and human well-being depends.
Description:
DATA AVAILABILITY : All the materials, raw data, and protocols used in the article are available upon request and without restriction, and all data will be made publicly available in a public repository (Figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24873135.v1) upon publication.