Vacant residential lots are ubiquitous in cities. While there is increasing interest in enhancing the aboveground habitat and biodiversity of vacant lots via restoration, vacant lot restoration may also affect the properties of and ecosystem services provided by soil. We assessed the effects of four vacant lot plant community establishment techniques (seed bombing, broadcast seeding, plug planting, and intensive gardening) and unaltered lawn on three critical ecosystem services provided by urban soils: carbon sequestration, nutrient retention, and water infiltration. We found that aboveground-focused treatments had belowground consequences. Consistent with other “urban grassland” studies, lawns exhibited the highest carbon storage among our treatments. However, soil carbon may increase in our other treatments over time – a common phenomenon in disturbed urban soils. We also found that nutrient retention – particularly nitrogen retention – increased with treatment intensity, likely due to increased plant uptake and microbial immobilization in our plots with prairie plantings. Finally, our most investment-intensive treatment, intensive gardening, resulted in decreased water infiltration, likely due to soil disturbance and increased bare soil resulting from frequent watering and weeding. Thus, treatments did not have consistent positive or negative effects on soil ecosystem services, emphasizing the multifunctionality and trade-offs associated with urban soil ecosystem processes. However, assuming low soil carbon and organic matter pools in our broadcast seeding and plug planting treatments recover over time, these two treatments may optimize aboveground plant community establishment and belowground ecosystem service provision in urban vacant lots.

空置住宅在城市无处不在。尽管人们越来越关注通过恢复来改善空地的地上栖息地和生物多样性，但恢复空地也可能会影响土壤的特性和土壤提供的生态系统服务。我们评估了四种空地植物群落建立技术（种子轰炸，播种播种，插秧和集约园艺）以及未改变的草坪对城市土壤提供的三种关键生态系统服务的影响：固碳，养分保留和水渗透。我们发现以地为中心的治疗具有地下后果。与其他“城市草地”研究一致，草坪在我们的处理中表现出最高的碳储量。然而，随着时间的推移，我们其他处理方法中的土壤碳可能会增加-这是城市土壤受干扰的普遍现象。我们还发现，养分保留-特别是氮保留-随着处理强度的增加而增加，这很可能是由于在我们种植大草原的地块中植物吸收和微生物固定增加了。最后，我们最投入密集的处理，即密集的园艺，可能是由于土壤扰动而导致的水渗透减少，并且由于频繁浇水和除草而导致的裸土增加。因此，处理并没有对土壤生态系统服务产生一致的正面或负面影响，强调了与城市土壤生态系统过程相关的多功能性和权衡取舍。然而，