Sustainable urban horticulture: managing soils for nutritional crops

我们EPSRC资助的研究表明，英国城市地区有足够的土地用于城市园艺（UH），为英国水果和蔬菜（F&V）生产做出重要贡献。Edmondson的EPSRC奖学金表明，可持续种植的UH F&V含有比同等商业园艺作物更低的营养浓度。UH被广泛认为是增加城市社区获得F&V的关键机制之一，但这些结果表明，与商业F&V的消费相比，这可能会减少营养素的摄入量。UH F&V的营养含量较低可能是由于UH作物的相对体积导致植物组织内的稀释，或化肥和农药的不一致应用。我们的研究表明，与菌根真菌的关联可以改善作物中的养分稀释2，而不受管制的有机土壤添加剂会对植物-真菌关联的功能产生负面影响，减少它们对植物的土壤养分供应3。总之，我们的新数据提出了关键问题，即我们如何在城市中可持续地扩大UH，同时降低商业园艺作物中的营养浓度。

Our EPSRC-funded research has demonstrated that there is potentially enough land in UK urbanareas for urban horticulture (UH) to make an important contribution to UK fruit and vegetable (F&V)production 1 . Edmondson's EPSRC fellowship revealed that sustainably grown UH F&V contain lowernutrient concentrations than equivalent commercial horticultural crops. UH is widely recognised asone of the key mechanisms to increasing access to F&V for urban communities, but these resultssuggest that one unintended consequence of this maybe reducing the intake of nutrients comparedto consumption of commercial F&V.Lower nutritional content of UH F&V might be driven by dilution within plant tissues due to therelative volume of UH crops, or less consistent application of fertilisers and pesticides. Our researchhas shown that associations with mycorrhizal fungi can ameliorate nutrient dilution in crops 2 andthat unregulated organic soil amendments negatively affect the functionality of plant-beneficialfungal associations, reducing their supply of soil nutrients to the plant 3 . Together, our novel dataraise key questions about how we may sustainably expand UH across cities whilst maintainingnutrient concentrations found in commercial horticultural crops.