Microbial diversity and soil health parameters associated with turfgrass landscapes

The sustainable management of urban landscapes, and the ecosystem services they provide, are driven in part by the health and microbial diversity of the soil. Most research on soil health has focused on agricultural lands used for food production, but creating more climate resilient cities will rely on improving our understanding of soil health in urban landscapes such as turfgrass. This study assessed the soil microbial diversity and major soil health parameters of three turfgrass landscapes with varying degrees of management intensity, an unmanaged prairie, and an agricultural site from three metropolitan areas in the Midwestern United States. Bacterial and fungal beta-diversity were significantly affected by location, land use, and management age with the interaction between land use and location explaining the most variance (25 % for bacteria and 14 % for fungi). Deviations in fungal alpha-diversity reflected the difference in management, with unmanaged prairie locations having consistently greater fungal alpha-diversity than that of managed turfgrasses and agricultural sites. The relative abundance of the beneficial fungi Glomeromycetes was significantly greater in the lawn turfgrass than any other land uses; however, this was biased by a high relative abundance from a single lawn site with relatively low soil phosphorus content (2.8 mg/kg). Bacterial and fungal community composition significantly correlated with soil P, Fe, and C content, pH, organic matter, sand and clay content, and the overall soil health rating. The majority of these soil parameters significantly and positively correlated with each other along with microbial process indicators including respiration rate, active carbon, and protein content. These soil health parameters and the microbiome assembly constitute the potential driving factors for many crucial microbial processes that drive ecosystem services and can be used to create more sustainable urban landscapes.