2018 ESA Annual Meeting (August 5 -- 10)

COS 89-3 - Microbial communities composition analysis from urban parks of Shanghai and their role in sustainability of parks

Wednesday, August 8, 2018: 2:10 PM
235-236, New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
Deepika Kumari1, Xin Wang2, Jiang Wu1 and Varenyam Achal3, (1)College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China, (2)Institute of Environment for Sustainable Development, Tongji University, Shanghai, China, (3)Shanghai Key Lab for Urban Ecological Processes and Eco-Restoration, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
Background/Question/Methods

Urban park soil plays a vital part in urban ecosystems, which harbor considerable bacterial and fungal diversities. Those microbes play critical roles in regulating soil fertility, plant health, and the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients. There are limited numbers of extensive studies focused on microbial diversity from urban parks, especially from China. Microbial diversity may influence sustainability of urban parks by playing an important role in all biogeochemical cycles and nutrient transformations in the soil. Also, as parks provide visitors with many services for health and well-being, it is important to know microbes they surrounded with. Shanghai being the largest city of China experienced with extensive urbanization that may influence microbes, the presented study report microbial diversity and their functional genes from 24 urban parks distributed across nine districts of this city. The microbial communities from soils of all 24 urban parks were analyzed by Illumina MiSeq sequencing the V3-V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene for bacteria, and internal transcribed spacer region using ITS3F and ITS4 primers for fungi.

Results/Conclusions

A total of 12,67,055 16S rRNA gene sequences and 540,657 effective fungal sequences were acquired at the taxonomic level, from 24 urban park soils. Among bacteria, there were 43 classified phyla with higher relative abundances of Proteobacteria and Acidobacteria accounting for 33.01–45.49 and 18.7–30.12%, respectively, while there were five fungal phyla, out of which Ascomycota was the most dominant phylum followed by Zygomycota and Basidiomycota. Majority of identified bacteria and fungi could provide sustainability in soil ecosystem of urban parks. There were also saprophytic fungi widely spread in all urban park soils, which may serve as opportunistic pathogens for humans and animals. Moreover, overall high microbial functional gene diversity for essential biogeochemical processes was considered to exist in soils of urban parks in Shanghai that could be helpful in maintaining fertility of park soils and thus greenery of city.