Factors Influencing Earthworm Fauna in Parks in Megacity Beijing, China: An Application of a Synthetic and Simple Index (ESI)

Tian Xie, Xuzhi Li, Meie Wang, Weiping Chen and Jack H. Faber
Additional contact information
Tian Xie: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Centre for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Xuzhi Li: State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Soil Environmental Management and Pollution Control, Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences, Ministry of Ecology and Environment, Nanjing 210042, China
Meie Wang: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Centre for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Weiping Chen: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Centre for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Jack H. Faber: Wageningen Environmental Research (Alterra), P.O. Box 47, 6800 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 10, 1-16

Abstract: Complicated factors in urban areas have been reported to impact the density, biomass, and diversity of earthworm fauna. Urban parks provide essential habitats for earthworm fauna. However, how earthworm fauna are impacted by park traits, such as construction age, distance to city center, visitor volumes, sizes of greenspaces/parks, and attractiveness, etc., still remains unknown. These traits are well characterized by the impacts of urbanization intensity and administration quality of parks in megacities. Therefore, 16 parks with gradients of construction ages and geographical locations in Beijing city were selected for investigation. Furthermore, an earthworm synthetic and simple index (ESI) for characterizing earthworm community has been developed to compensate for the lack of robustness by using single ecological indexes. The results showed that earthworm population density (38.6 ind/m 2 ) and biomass (34.0 g/m 2 ) in parks were comparable to those in other land use types in Beijing. Ecological groupings were dominated by disturbance-tolerant endogeic and deep soil-inhabiting anecic groups, and most of them were adults. The earthworm population was influenced by urbanization intensity, while the earthworm community composition, species biodiversity, and ESI were affected by administration quality of parks. The soil moisture and microbial biomass carbon were the key factors in shaping earthworm assemblages. ESI could be employed as an effective indicator in depicting character of earthworm fauna. This study highlighted the impacts of park traits on earthworms in urban parks. The variation in park traits that influence earthworm fauna was probably attributed to soil properties.

Keywords: urbanization process; urban park; invertebrate biodiversity; earthworm assemblage; edaphic property (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/10/6054/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/10/6054/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:10:p:6054-:d:817051

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().