Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center, University of Florida, IFAS, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314, USA.
Mol Ecol. 2010 Dec;19(24):5521-30. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2010.04891.x. Epub 2010 Nov 4.
The general patterns of increasing biodiversity from the poles to the equator have been well documented for large terrestrial organisms such as plants and vertebrates but are largely unknown for microbiota. In contrast to macrobiota, microbiota have long been assumed to exhibit cosmopolitan, random distributions and a lack of spatial patterns. To evaluate the assumption, we conducted a survey of nematode diversity within the soil, litter and canopy habitats of the humid lowland tropical rainforest of Costa Rica using an ultrasequencing ecometagenetic approach at a species-equivalent taxonomic level. Our data indicate that both richness and diversity of nematode communities in the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica are high and exceed observed values from temperate ecosystems. The majority of nematode species were unknown to science, providing evidence for the presence of highly endemic (not cosmopolitan) species of still completely undiscovered biodiversity. Most importantly, the greater taxonomic resolution used here allowed us to reveal predictable habitat associations for specific taxa and thus gain insights into their nonrandom distribution patterns.
从两极到赤道，生物多样性逐渐增加的一般模式在大型陆地生物（如植物和脊椎动物）中已有充分记录，但在微生物群中却知之甚少。与宏生物群不同，微生物群长期以来一直被认为具有世界性、随机分布和缺乏空间模式的特点。为了评估这一假设，我们采用超序列生态宏基因组学方法，在物种等效分类学水平上，对哥斯达黎加潮湿低地热带雨林的土壤、凋落物和冠层生境中的线虫多样性进行了调查。我们的数据表明，哥斯达黎加热带雨林中线虫群落的丰富度和多样性都很高，超过了从温带生态系统中观察到的值。大多数线虫物种不为科学界所知，这为存在高度特有（非世界性）的、尚未完全发现的生物多样性提供了证据。最重要的是，这里使用的更大的分类分辨率使我们能够揭示特定类群的可预测的栖息地关联，从而深入了解它们的非随机分布模式。
