Litter additions and land-use legacy in urban grasslands, Baltimore County, MD, USA

The expansion of cities into surrounding agricultural and natural landscapes create complex, dynamic mosaics of land-use patterns. Current vegetation supplies soil microorganisms with inputs including litter, root exudates, and fine root turnover. Legacy effects of previous land-use and management also affect the edaphic conditions which shape soil microbiome structure and function. We evaluated the interaction of land-use history and contemporary litters of different quality in chronosequences of urban grasslands with either agricultural or forested land-use history.