Fungal community composition analysis of 24 different urban parks in Shanghai, China

Urban parks are an important constituent of cities; they harbour microbial diversity which plays a key role in soil ecosystem functioning. The bacterial diversity of many urban parks around the world has been reported; however, the role of fungi is often ignored. There are only one or two published reports of fungal community composition analysis from urban parks. In the present study, we investigated soil fungal diversity in 24 urban parks in Shanghai using Illumina MiSeq sequencing. At the taxonomic level, 540,657 effective fungal sequences were acquired from the soil from 24 urban parks. Other than some unclassified phyla, the operational taxonomic units (OTUs) collected from all 24 urban park soils were distributed into five fungal phyla; of these, Ascomycota was the most dominant phylum, followed by Zygomycota and Basidiomycota. Many fungi identified in the present study are known to play key roles in the environment, with particularly important roles in maintaining sustainability in the soil ecosystem. The identified mycorrhizal fungi may play a major role in the biogeochemical cycle, as these fungi obtain carbon from their host plants and allocate it to the soil ecosystem; they also participate in mineralisation of various inorganic substances, helping with the growth of plants.