Abstract
Increasing evidence suggests that degradation of biodiversity in human populated areas is a threat for the ecosystem processes that are relevant for human well-being. Fungi are a megadiverse kingdom that plays a key role in ecosystem processes and affects human well-being. How urbanization influences fungi has remained poorly understood, partially due to the methodological difficulties in comprehensively surveying fungi. Here we show that both aerial and soil fungal communities are greatly poorer in urban than in natural areas. Strikingly, a fivefold reduction in fungal DNA abundance took place in both air and soil samples already at 1 km scale when crossing the edge from natural to urban habitats. Furthermore, in the air, fungal diversity decreased with urbanization even more than in the soil. This result is counterintuitive as fungal spores are known to disperse over large distances. A large proportion of the fungi detectable in the air are specialized to natural habitats, whereas soil fungal communities comprise a large proportion of habitat generalists. The sensitivity of the aerial fungal community to anthropogenic disturbance makes this method a reliable and efficient bioindicator of ecosystem health in urban areas.
Highlights
Biodiversity in urban areas contributes to many kinds of ecosystem processes important for human well-being, including amelioration of climate, soil erosion control, Supplementary information The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.10 Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, P.O
The combination of probabilistic taxonomic placement and clustering resulted in 79,155 operational taxonomical units (OTUs) representing the species level
We found a large proportion of all taxa to be specialized to natural areas, such as the entire phylum Basidiomycota, whereas almost no taxa were specialized to urban areas (Fig. 3)
Summary
Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 Jyväskylä, Finland. Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics, Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. Urban core 1 km Natural core 1 km Urban 1 km Urban edge. Natural edge x 3 per plot 5 cm Natural x 3 per plot 5 cm. Soil sampling [9], gaining a predictive understanding on how urbanization affects biodiversity is a key priority for sustainable development
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