Abstract
The biodiversity hypothesis links urban species richness to human immunity, yet overlooks habitat heterogeneity that can quarantine pathogenic microbiota. We propose the β-diversity hypothesis: increased tree heterogeneity promotes urban microbial heterogeneity and improve human health. Using plant surveys and paired data of soil, phyllosphere and airborne microbiota transferred indoors (AMTI) across 72 Shanghai neighborhoods, we showed that elevated tree heterogeneity corresponds to higher β-diversity in both AMTI and soil communities. The spatial patterning of respiratory diseases (RDs) was driven by AMTI β-heterogeneity, revealing that homogenization of airborne microbiota affects human respiratory health. We further developed the urban tree βdis model and identified a threshold value of 0.661. Selecting phylogenetically distant tree families, e.g. Arecaceae, Oleaceae and Magnoliaceae at or above this threshold yields ready-to-use planting templates that maintains AMTI β-diversity and a scalable protocol for city-wide greening. Given microbial heterogeneity’s emerging health links, our findings call for embedding the β-diversity hypothesis into biodiversity–health frameworks and for cross-biome validation.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all members of the Hui Lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, including Muhammad Khalid, Haoxin Tan, Xiaoxiao Li, Xinxin Liu, Peiyuan Wang, Lantian Su, Jieqi Ye, Baoming Du, Jinyang Huang, Saeed ur Rahman, Yucheng Bian, Jiangyao Xu, Runkun Yao, Weixin Zhang, and Yuchen Wang, for their efforts in field sampling, laboratory work, or kind support throughout this study. This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program (project number: 2023YFE0112000, N.H.), National Natural Science Foundation (project number: 32371843, N.H.), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (project number: 2025M782702, C.Z.), and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (Grade B) of CPSF (project number: GZB20250656, C.Z.).
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Zhao, C., Jumpponen, A., Setälä, H. et al. Beta-diversity of urban vegetation shapes microbial heterogeneity and maintains healthy environment.
Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72572-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72572-9
Source: Ecology - nature.com
