Manhattan's Central Park a Microbe Goldmine

Manhattan's Central Park is a thin strip of green amid one of the world's densest cities - hardly the place to harbor rich biodiversity. Well, new research has shown that this refuge from the hustle and bustle of New York City actually houses thousands of microbes rivaling diverse biomes around the world, including the soils of the arctic, desert, and tropical locales.

"This is an excellent work [that] demonstrates the vast diversity of soil community, most of which remained undescribed," microbial ecologist Brajesh Singh of the University of Western Sydney in Australia told The Scientist. "Interestingly they found that belowground diversity from urban and managed soils have similar diversity to some of known natural ecosystems, which indicate the high resilience of belowground diversity to anthropogenic pressures."

As part of a mission called the BioBlitz, a group of 10 ecologists scoured the 843-acre island, taking soil samples every 50 meters as tourists looked on, un-phased. It's already known that Central Park plays host to various animal and plant species, but there's a ton of invisible wildlife, too lurking beneath our feet.

Microbes are actually very difficult to study not just in Central Park, but around the world. For one, it requires a lot of digging. But even more difficult is being able to tell the species apart because the diversity of this underground life is based on chemistry, not observation, National Geographic reports.

Nonetheless, after collecting nearly 600 soil samples and analyzing the microbes' DNA, the team of diggers was shocked by their findings. They identified over 167,000 species - that's about 30 times more species than all the mammals on Earth.

"I expected to find quite a bit of [bacterial] biodiversity," study team leader Kelly Ramirez told The Scientist. But the finding that the eukaryotic "biodiversity in Central Park almost rivaled the global [diversity], that was pretty exciting and surprising," she added. "This work highlights that even in a location that is well known and visited by millions of people a year, we still have a lot to learn about that biodiversity below our feet."

So how exactly did this microbe goldmine blossom in a place surrounded by Manhattan's ocean of concrete and skyscrapers? The researchers say that over time people have added many different kinds of plants, as well as fertilizer and chemicals, creating environments prime for flourishing microbes.

Ramirez and her team emphasize that their research could be incorporated into future management and conservation policies in order to protect ecosystems in which these microbes are crucial.