Central Park in New York CityFLICKR, KEVIN DOOLEYThe soil of New York City’s Central Park is bursting with biodiversity spanning all three domains of life, according to a study published today (October 1) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In fact, the urban environment harbored as many different microbial species as diverse biomes around the world, including the soils of the arctic, desert, and tropical locales.
“This is an excellent work [that] demonstrates the vast diversity of soil community, most of which remained undescribed,” microbial ecologist Brajesh Singh of the University of Western Sydney in Australia wrote in an e-mail. “Interestingly they found that belowground diversity from urban and managed soils have similar diversity to some of known natural ecosystems, which indicate the high resilience of belowground diversity to anthropogenic pressures.”
On a hot, humid day in July 2012, Kelly Ramirez, then a postdoc at Colorado State University and executive director of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, and nine of her colleagues blanketed Central Park. Starting on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the researchers broke into four teams, taking soil samples every 50 meters throughout the ...
