Tage der Biodiversität 2027

The rapid pace of urbanisation is a global phenomenon. This trend is presenting humanity with a growing host of problems, including increasing land consumption, the loss of biodiversity, and rising levels of metal pollution in urban soils. Ongoing climate change is exacerbating these problems even further. On the other hand, there is a growing demand amongst local residents for urban green spaces such as parks, children playgrounds and allotments for urban gardening and agriculture. It is therefore of the utmost importance to monitor and control the levels of metal contamination in the soil of these green spaces. The use of invertebrates as biomonitors to assess the metal contamination of soils is a long established method by which metal concentrations detected in these animals reflect the metal fractions that have entered the natural foodweb. However, the increasing stress caused by environmental pollution and the effects of climate change are compromising biodiversity of urban soil fauna. Hence, the availability of soil invertebrates as biomonitors of metal pollution is more and more limited to the most resilient species that can cope with this combination of stress factors and that, at the same time, are capable of accumulating elevated amounts of metals in their tissues. We show that a loss of biodiversity affects all major terrestrial invertebrate clades in urban areas. As an example, we identify a small number of resilient species and species groups from the clades of terrestrial Isopoda and Gastropoda that will be available in the medium term for biomonitoring of metal pollution in urban soils.