Soil contamination in nearby natural areas mirrors that in urban greenspaces worldwide

Soil contamination is one of the main threats to ecosystem health and sustainability. Yet little is known about the extent to which soil contaminants differ between urban greenspaces and natural ecosystems. Here we show that urban greenspaces and adjacent natural areas (i.e., natural/semi-natural ecosystems) shared similar levels of multiple soil contaminants (metal(loid)s, pesticides, microplastics, and antibiotic resistance genes) across the globe. We reveal that human influence explained many forms of soil contamination worldwide. Socio-economic factors were integral to explaining the occurrence of soil contaminants worldwide. We further show that increased levels of multiple soil contaminants were linked with changes in microbial traits including genes associated with environmental stress resistance, nutrient cycling, and pathogenesis. Taken together, our work demonstrates that human-driven soil contamination in nearby natural areas mirrors that in urban greenspaces globally, and highlights that soil contaminants have the potential to cause dire consequences for ecosystem sustainability and human wellbeing.

Yu-Rong Liu, Marcel G. A. van der Heijden, Judith Riedo, Carlos Sanz-Lazaro, David J. Eldridge, Felipe Bastida, Eduardo Moreno-Jiménez, Xin-Quan Zhou, Hang-Wei Hu, Ji-Zheng He, José L. Moreno, Sebastian Abades, Fernando Alfaro, Adebola R. Bamigboye, Miguel Berdugo, José L. Blanco-Pastor, Asunción de los Ríos, Jorge Duran, Tine Grebenc, Javier G. Illán, Thulani P. Makhalanyane, Marco A. Molina-Montenegro, Tina U. Nahberger, Gabriel F. Peñaloza-Bojacá, César Plaza, Ana Rey, Alexandra Rodríguez, Christina Siebe, Alberto L. Teixido, Nuria Casado-Coy, Pankaj Trivedi, Cristian Torres-Díaz, Jay Prakash Verma, Arpan Mukherjee, Xiao-Min Zeng, Ling Wang, Jianyong Wang, Eli Zaady, Xiaobing Zhou, Qiaoyun Huang, Wenfeng Tan, Yong-Guan Zhu, Matthias C. Rillig, Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo