Earth’s soils are crucial study systems in light of the two major environmental challenges of the 21st century: anthropogenic climate change and ecosystem alteration. We depend on soils for anchoring crops and forests, for water filtration and storage, and for nutrient cycling (including decomposition). Soil organisms control many of these fundamental processes. As such, it is important to understand how these ecological communities function and to explore the types of stressors and disturbances that might affect the structure and activity of these communities. This study aims to quantify the diversity and variability of two forest soils in New York State to explore the potential resilience of forest soils to anthropogenic contamination. From May-November 2022, our field team of educators, students, and recent college graduates sampled 16 forest stands dominated by oaks (Quercus sp.), eight in each of our two study forests (Black Rock Forest, Cornwall, NY, and Van Cortlandt Park (northwest woods), Bronx, NY). Our team recorded the species composition and size (DBH) for all trees within our plots, and used quadrat sampling to collect soil cores (n=8 per plot) for analysis of bulk density, soil moisture, pH, total C/N/P, exchangeable cations, heavy metal content, and faunal abundance/diversity. Analysis is ongoing, but our initial physio-chemical results are compelling; bulk density, organic matter content, exchangeable cations, water holding capacity, and pH differed significantly for soils across our study plots. Furthermore, some of our variables clearly show anticipated trends based on environmental gradients (such as a decrease in pH between our urban and rural forests, and a decrease in bulk density with increasing elevation of the study site). The diversity and variability of the soils suggests that our team will discover similar diversity and variability in the soil ecological communities surveyed. This is important because the next stage of research by our team involves establishing long-term (18-month) incubations across our 16 field sites to explore how diverse, naturally occurring soil communities respond to anthropogenic plastic contamination. Given the importance of functioning soil ecological communities, surprisingly little is known about their dynamics and sensitivity to potential pollutants. In the age of anthropogenic global change, it is increasingly urgent to understand these vulnerabilities, but also to consider the possibility of ecosystem resiliency along with ecosystem collapse.
