With increased population growth and suburban sprawl, anthropogenic landscapes such as urban ecosystems are becoming increasingly abundant, with changes in land cover contributing to loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions. As such, it is important to understand how land cover choices impact ecosystem services and functions within urban ecosystems. Turf grass lawns are the default landscape in North America, but recent efforts have focused on replacing lawns with native plant communities. Native plant communities within urban ecosystems increase abundance and diversity of insects and insectivorous birds, but less is known about how native gardens could impact underlying soil bacterial communities. In this study, we identified 13 sites in the Omaha/Lincoln, Nebraska, USA area with native plant gardens that were converted from turf grass. We collected soil samples in October, 2020 (n = 18 native garden soil samples and n = 13 turf grass samples) and isolated DNA for high throughput sequencing. We compared the bacterial community structure, bacterial diversity, and individual bacterial taxa between native plant gardens and adjacent turf grass. We found several potentially beneficial bacterial taxa to be more abundant in native garden soil than in adjacent turf. The genera Gemmatimonas, Kofleria, and Acidobacteria belonging to Subdivision3 genera incertae sedis, were significantly more abundant in native garden soils, while Solirubrobacter was significantly more abundant in turf grass soils. Kofleria has been suggested as a keystone taxon for rich organic soils, while greater abundance of Gemmatimonas in native garden soils indicates a high level of soil carbon and phosphorous sequestration and functions as a potential sink for the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Native gardens also supported significantly more bacterial biodiversity than adjacent turf. These findings suggest that conversion of turf grass to native gardens could improve ecosystem services associated with soil bacterial diversity such as increased carbon sequestration, phosphate dissolution, and soil reduction of nitrous oxide.
