Spatial Scaling of Microbial Diversity across Various Functional and Phylogenetic Taxa

Abstract

Understanding the spatial patterns of organisms and the underlying mechanisms shaping biotic communities is a central goal in community ecology. One of the most well documented spatial patterns in plant and animal communities is the positive-power law relationship between species (or taxa) richness and area. Such a taxa-area relationships (TARs) are one of the principal generalizations in ecology, and are fundamental to our understanding of the distribution of global biodiversity. However, TARs remain elusive and controversial in microbial communities, especially in soil habitats, due to inadequate sampling methodologies. Here, we describe TARs, at a whole-community level, across various microbial functional and phylogenetic groups in a forest soil using a comprehensive functional gene array (FGA) with > 24,000 probes. Our analysis indicated that the forest soil microbial community exhibited a relatively flat taxa-area relationship (slope z = 0.0624), but the z values varied considerably across different functional and phylogenetic groups (z = 0.0475-0.0959), which are several times lower than those commonly observed in higher plants and animals. These results suggest that the turnover in space of microorganisms may be, in general, lower than that of plants and animals.