Poster: Using urban grasslands to explore constraints of soil microarthropod biodiversity

While the field of urban ecology is growing rapidly, there is a lack of research on soil invertebrates and how their communities may be altered by urbanization. To fill this knowledge gap, we examined how facets of the built environment may drive microarthropod abundance, diversity, and function across a rural-urban gradient of 40 public parks in Rochester, NY. We hypothesized that soil microarthropod biodiversity and richness would decrease as landscapes became more urban and that urbanization would diminish functional similarity in microarthropod communities. The study also expected socioeconomic status to be negatively correlated with measures of microarthropod diversity and richness due to the frequent utilization of high-income parks.

Contrary to our expectations, this study found that microarthropod species richness and diversity were not negatively related to urbanization, and that urbanization could benefit these soil communities in some instances. However, urbanization appears to have a negative influence on the functional similarity of microarthropod communities. Additionally, this study revealed that measures of microarthropod community composition were often negatively related to socioeconomic status, contrary to the predictions of the so-called “Luxury Effect” hypothesis. In summary, our results suggest that urban microarthropods may not be influenced by urbanization in the same manner as larger aboveground organisms. Urban microarthropod communities are surprisingly diverse and comparable to many native ecosystems, even in heavily urbanized areas, and are likely to play essential roles as reservoirs for biodiversity and provisioning of soil ecosystem services, particularly in historically neglected or marginalized communities.