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Urban soil biodiversity plays an essential role in sustaining ecosystem processes like plant growth and nutrient cycling, whilst also directly contributing to human health through pathogen control and remediation. Despite these benefits, scientists still lack a comprehensive understanding of how city-level conditions, including population density, climate change effects, and economic indicators such as gross domestic product, affect soil ecosystems. To resolve this, the Global Urban Soil Biodiversity initiative proposes using standardised environmental DNA metabarcoding to map and monitor urban soil communities worldwide. The project introduces a uniform protocol for soil sampling and molecular analysis, alongside an international network of researchers to pool and evaluate data. By establishing standardised global datasets, the project intends to determine how urban expansion affects soil biota and to provide evidence that can guide sustainable urban planning and municipal environmental policy.
Urban soils are vital for healthy city living, aiding plant growth and human immune health, but their biological condition remains largely unmapped. By developing a unified environmental DNA monitoring standard across global cities, this initiative seeks to understand how urban development changes soil life, ultimately providing city planners and governments with reliable evidence to design healthier, more sustainable urban environments.
This initiative represents early-stage scientific infrastructure and methodology rather than a direct commercial product. It could ultimately enable environmental consulting firms, municipal planning authorities, and biotechnology teams to use standardised environmental DNA protocols for urban land assessment and monitoring. However, commercialisation is distant, as the project is currently focused on establishing global sampling frameworks, gathering baseline datasets, and fostering research collaboration.
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Urban soil biodiversity sustains critical ecosystem functions such as nutrient cycling and plant growth, while also supporting human health through pathogen suppression, soil remediation, and human immune system training. Yet, the distribution of urban soil biodiversity and its dependence on the influencing city-specific factors, such as economic development (e.g., GDP, Human Development Index), population density, and effects of climate change remain poorly understood. To bridge this research gap, we propose a global initiative applying environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding to classify, map and better understand urban soil biodiversity and uncover its environmental drivers. We introduce a sampling and analysis protocol that facilitates the integration of global urban soil biodiversity data using eDNA analysis (acronym: Global-USB). We aim to build and grow a global network of researchers who contribute and analyze urban soil biodiversity data in a standardized way. This initiative will assess the impacts of urban land use and development on soil biota to gain insights into subsequent feedback effects on ecosystem functions and human well-being. By creating new and integrating established global datasets, this effort aims to generate actionable scientific insights to inform sustainable urban planning and policy, contributing to cities that support both ecological integrity and human well-being.
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DOI: 10.25674/474
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