Microbes do not follow the elevational diversity patterns of plants and animals
Microbes do not follow the elevational diversity patterns of plants and animals
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DOI：
10.1890/10-1170.1
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发表时间：
2011-04-01
期刊：
影响因子：
4.8
通讯作者：
Knight, Rob
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fierer, Noah;McCain, Christy M.;Knight, Rob
植物和动物多样性的海拔梯度是生态学中记录最广泛的模式之一，尽管没有一致的解释，但在过去的一个世纪中已经提出了许多假设来解释这些模式。从历史上看，对海拔多样性梯度的研究几乎完全集中在植物和动物类群上。因此，我们不知道微生物是否表现出多样性的海拔梯度，与宏观分类单元观察到的梯度相似。这代表了生态学中的一个关键知识差距，特别是考虑到微生物的普遍性、丰富性和功能重要性。在这里，我们发现，在秘鲁东部的山地海拔梯度上，生活在三个不同栖息地（有机土壤、矿质土壤和叶面）的细菌在多样性方面没有表现出显着的海拔梯度（在所有情况下，r（2）<0.17，P>0.1），这与在同一山地梯度上观察到的植物和动物类群的显着多样性变化形成鲜明对比（在所有情况下，r（2）>0.75，P<0.001）。这一发现表明，细菌表现出的生物地理模式与植物和动物的生物地理模式有着根本的不同，强调需要在生物地理学中发展更具包容性的概念和理论来解释这些差异。
The elevational gradient in plant and animal diversity is one of the most widely documented patterns in ecology and, although no consensus explanation exists, many hypotheses have been proposed over the past century to explain these patterns. Historically, research on elevational diversity gradients has focused almost exclusively on plant and animal taxa. As a result, we do not know whether microbes exhibit elevational gradients in diversity that parallel those observed for macroscopic taxa. This represents a key knowledge gap in ecology, especially given the ubiquity, abundance, and functional importance of microbes. Here we show that, across a montane elevational gradient in eastern Peru, bacteria living in three distinct habitats (organic soil, mineral soil, and leaf surfaces) exhibit no significant elevational gradient in diversity (r(2) < 0.17, P > 0.1 in all cases), in direct contrast to the significant diversity changes observed for plant and animal taxa across the same montane gradient (r(2) > 0.75, P < 0.001 in all cases). This finding suggests that the biogeographical patterns exhibited by bacteria are fundamentally different from those of plants and animals, highlighting the need for the development of more inclusive concepts and theories in biogeography to explain these disparities.