An international study of parks and gardens finds even the humble roadside verge plays an important role in the environment and for our health.

The study, published in Science Advances, found that even roadside verges contribute a range of important microbial communities that are critical for sustaining productive ecosystem services, such as filtering pollutants and sequestering carbon dioxide.

«Parks are not the homogenised ecological deserts that we think they are — they are living ecosystems that do amazing things,» study co-author, Professor David Eldridge from the Centre for Ecosystem Science in UNSW Science’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences says.

«Urban greenspaces harbour important microbes, so if you want to sustain a bunch of ecosystem services, you need to have plenty of parks and green spaces.»

The study took soil samples from different type of urban green spaces and comparable neighbouring natural ecosystems in 56 cities from 17 countries across six continents.

The urban greenspaces studied included Olympic Park in Beijing, the University of Queensland campus in Brisbane, Retiro in Madrid Spain, and the park surrounding Uppsala Castle in Uppsala, Sweden.

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Materials provided by University of New South Wales. Original written by Diane Nazaroff. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.