Digging the New York City Skyline: Soil Fungal Communities in Green Roofs and City Parks
Open Access
- 1 March 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Public Library of Science (PLoS) in PLOS ONE
- Vol. 8 (3), e58020
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0058020
Abstract
In urban environments, green roofs provide a number of benefits, including decreased urban heat island effects and reduced energy costs for buildings. However, little research has been done on the non-plant biota associated with green roofs, which likely affect their functionality. For the current study, we evaluated whether or not green roofs planted with two native plant communities in New York City functioned as habitats for soil fungal communities, and compared fungal communities in green roof growing media to soil microbial composition in five city parks, including Central Park and the High Line. Ten replicate roofs were sampled one year after planting; three of these roofs were more intensively sampled and compared to nearby city parks. Using Illumina sequencing of the fungal ITS region we found that green roofs supported a diverse fungal community, with numerous taxa belonging to fungal groups capable of surviving in disturbed and polluted habitats. Across roofs, there was significant biogeographical clustering of fungal communities, indicating that community assembly of roof microbes across the greater New York City area is locally variable. Green roof fungal communities were compositionally distinct from city parks and only 54% of the green roof taxa were also found in the park soils. Phospholipid fatty acid analysis revealed that park soils had greater microbial biomass and higher bacterial to fungal ratios than green roof substrates. City park soils were also more enriched with heavy metals, had lower pH, and lower quantities of total bases (Ca, K, and Mg) compared to green roof substrates. While fungal communities were compositionally distinct across green roofs, they did not differentiate by plant community. Together, these results suggest that fungi living in the growing medium of green roofs may be an underestimated component of these biotic systems functioning to support some of the valued ecological services of green roofs.Keywords
This publication has 45 references indexed in Scilit:
- Microbial Population and Community Dynamics on Plant Roots and Their Feedbacks on Plant CommunitiesAnnual Review of Microbiology, 2012
- Rapid responses of soil microorganisms improve plant fitness in novel environmentsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012
- Ultra-high-throughput microbial community analysis on the Illumina HiSeq and MiSeq platformsThe ISME Journal, 2012
- Sources of Bacteria in Outdoor Air across Cities in the Midwestern United StatesApplied and Environmental Microbiology, 2011
- Phylogenetic relatedness predicts priority effects in nectar yeast communitiesProceedings. Biological sciences, 2011
- Search and clustering orders of magnitude faster than BLASTBioinformatics, 2010
- QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing dataNature Methods, 2010
- Pyrosequencing-Based Assessment of Soil pH as a Predictor of Soil Bacterial Community Structure at the Continental ScaleApplied and Environmental Microbiology, 2009
- Microbial biogeography: putting microorganisms on the mapNature Reviews Microbiology, 2006
- Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programsNucleic Acids Research, 1997