Changes through time in soil Collembola communities exposed to urbanization

Abstract

The study aimed to assess if long-term exposure to urbanization changes the structure and composition of soil collembolan communities in urban green components (street lawns and park lawns) and in all urban green. Species diversity metrics, rarefaction, species richness estimators (Chao 1 and ACE) and multivariate analysis were used for the comparison of changes in community structure and diversity pattern over ca 30 years’ time span. Our results clearly demonstrate a shift, through time, in Collembola community composition and structure in an urban ecosystem and confirm that there is a linkage between long-term exposure to urbanization and changes in collembolan communities. Long-term urbanization led to erosion in species diversity and the formation of species-poor communities, species replacement, loss of specialized forms and promoted the invasion of exotic species. However, we show that the time span considered produced significant differences in diversity attribute values for the collembolan communities from street lawns and insignificant differences in park lawns, also we noted lack of significant differences in collembolan abundance across the two urban green components. The observed temporal changes in collembolan communities indicate that their response to disturbances in urban settings and selecting species is shaped by multiple processes. We conclude that more resistant collembolan communities were found over time in less stressed urban greening components such as park lawn soils compared to street lawn soils.