Abstract
Abstract. Urban soils are of increasing interest for their potential to provide ecosystem services such as carbon storage and nutrient cycling. Despite this, there is limited knowledge on how soil sealing with impervious surfaces, a common disturbance in urban environments, affects these important ecosystem services. In this paper, we investigate the effect of soil sealing on soil properties, soil carbon and soil nutrient stocks. We undertook a comparative survey of sealed and unsealed green space soils across the UK city of Manchester. Our results reveal that the context of urban soil and the anthropogenic artefacts added to soil have a great influence on soil properties and functions. In general, sealing reduced soil carbon and nutrient stocks compared to green space soil; however, where there were anthropogenic additions of organic and mineral artefacts, this led to increases in soil carbon and nitrate content. Anthropogenic additions led to carbon stocks equivalent to or larger than those in green spaces; this was likely a result of charcoal additions, leading to carbon stores with long residence times. This suggests that in areas with an industrial past, anthropogenic additions can lead to a legacy carbon store in urban soil and make important contributions to urban soil carbon budgets. These findings shed light on the heterogeneity of urban sealed soil and the influence of anthropogenic artefacts on soil functions. Our research highlights the need to gain a further understanding of urban soil processes, in both sealed and unsealed soils, and of the influence and legacy of anthropogenic additions for soil functions and important ecosystem services.
Highlights
To date, little attention has been given to urban soil and its functions; the importance of urban soil is increasingly being recognised due to its role supporting sustainable urban development and the provision of soil ecosystem services in cities (Pavao-Zuckerman, 2012; Morel et al, 2015; Yang and Zhang, 2015; Vasenev et al, 2018; Pouyat et al, 2020)
Our results indicate that sealed anthropogenic (SA) soil had much greater total C stocks than green space soil, and greater soil organic matter (SOM) contents than sealed undisturbed (SU) soil, though this was not statistically significantly
Our results showed a reduction of 37 % of C stock in SU soil compared to green space soil, a notably smaller reduction than that seen in other studies, where reductions were 66 % in New York (Raciti et al, 2012), 68 % in China (Wei et al, 2014a), and 61.86 % in Alabama and Georgia, USA (Majidzadeh et al, 2017)
Summary
Little attention has been given to urban soil and its functions; the importance of urban soil is increasingly being recognised due to its role supporting sustainable urban development and the provision of soil ecosystem services in cities (Pavao-Zuckerman, 2012; Morel et al, 2015; Yang and Zhang, 2015; Vasenev et al, 2018; Pouyat et al, 2020). The number of people living in urban areas is projected to grow, with almost 70 % of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050 (United Nations, 2019). This expansion of urban areas will have consequences for soil and the ecosystem services it’s able to provide in urban areas. It leads to additions of anthropogenic materials known as artefacts, which include brick, concrete, metals and plastics (Bullock and Gregory, 1991; Lehmann and Stahr, 2007), as well as contamination with heavy metals which can alter nutrient cycles (Zhao et al, 2013), and organic and inorganic pollutants (Li et al, 2018).
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