A nationwide map of soil bacterial biodiversity and determination of environmental controls on community structure

探测和量化我们的生物多样性是了解我们的生态系统及其服务如何形成，以及自然和人为因素如何影响生态系统生存能力的基本先决条件。虽然这在动植物生态学的大多数领域都是很先进的，但细菌的微观性质意味着我们实际上对英国境内的主要细菌群及其分布一无所知。重要的是，细菌在提高植物生产力和生物地球化学养分循环中发挥着核心作用。我们必须了解目前存在哪些主要种群，是什么控制着它们的分布，现在和未来发生的环境变化将如何影响它们种群的多样性，它们发挥的生物地球化学功能，以及这些如何映射到综合生态系统评估中。在这个应用程序中，我们建议通过评估整个英格兰、苏格兰和威尔士主要陆生细菌群的出现来解决这一不足，作为即将到来的2007年农村调查的一部分。在这种全球独特的方法中，我们将通过高通量分子生物学方法检测细菌群，测量关键的土壤化学参数，并共同分析这些数据丰富的变量，以解决几个关键假设。此外，我们将制作英国细菌群分布的高分辨率地图，并将这些数据与现有的公开数据结合起来，在2007年农村调查核心计划中通过万维网传播。最后，在本次调查过程中，我们将形成并存档一个全国可访问的基因组库，供其他研究人员使用，以便他们可以解决与其他微生物群和过程有关的自己的特定假设。

Detecting and quantifying our biodiversity is a fundamental prerequisite to understanding how our ecosystems and their services are formed, and how natural and anthropogenic factors effect ecosystem viability. Whilst this is well advanced for most fields of animal and plant ecology, the microscopic nature of bacteria means we have virtually no understanding of what the major groups of bacteria, or their distributions, are within Great Britain. Critically, bacteria perform central roles in enhancing plant productivity and biogeochemical nutrient cycling. It is imperative that we understand which major groups are present, what controls their distribution, and how environmental changes occurring now, and in the future, will affect the diversity of their populations, the biogeochemical functions they perform and how this maps to integrated ecosystem assessments. In this application, we propose to address this shortfall by assessing the occurrence of major terrestrial bacterial groups across the whole of England, Scotland and Wales, as part of the upcoming Countryside Survey of 2007. In this globally unique approach, we will detect bacterial groups by high throughput molecular biological methods, measure key soil chemistry parameters, and co-analyse these data rich variables to address several key hypotheses. Further, we will produce high resolution maps of bacterial group distribution across Great Britain and couple these data to existing publicly available data, disseminated through the world wide web, within the Countryside Survey 2007 core programme. Finally, during the process of this investigation, we will form and archive a nationally accessible genome bank for use by other investigators in order that they may address their own specific hypotheses in relation to other microbial groups and processes.