Department of Ecology, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany.
CIRAD, UMR LSTM, Montpellier, France.
Mol Ecol. 2018 Jul;27(13):2846-2857. doi: 10.1111/mec.14731. Epub 2018 Jun 17.
Tropical animals and plants are known to have high alpha diversity within forests, but low beta diversity between forests. By contrast, it is unknown whether microbes inhabiting the same ecosystems exhibit similar biogeographic patterns. To evaluate the biogeographies of tropical protists, we used metabarcoding data of species sampled in the soils of three lowland Neotropical rainforests. Taxa-area and distance-decay relationships for three of the dominant protist taxa and their subtaxa were estimated at both the OTU and phylogenetic levels, with presence-absence and abundance-based measures. These estimates were compared to null models. High local alpha and low regional beta diversity patterns were consistently found for both the parasitic Apicomplexa and the largely free-living Cercozoa and Ciliophora. Similar to animals and plants, the protists showed spatial structures between forests at the OTU and phylogenetic levels, and only at the phylogenetic level within forests. These results suggest that the biogeographies of macro- and micro-organismal eukaryotes in lowland Neotropical rainforests are partially structured by the same general processes. However, and unlike the animals and plants, the protist OTUs did not exhibit spatial structures within forests, which hinders our ability to estimate the local and regional diversity of protists in tropical forests.
热带地区的动植物以森林内部具有较高的α多样性和森林之间较低的β多样性而闻名。相比之下，栖息在同一生态系统中的微生物是否表现出类似的生物地理模式尚不清楚。为了评估热带原生生物的生物地理学特征，我们利用从三个新热带低地雨林土壤中采集的物种的代谢组学数据进行了研究。在 OTU 和系统发育水平上，我们分别使用存在/缺失和基于丰度的方法，对三种主要原生生物类群及其亚类群的分类单元-面积和距离衰减关系进行了估计。然后将这些估计值与零模型进行了比较。寄生的顶复门和主要自由生活的原生动物门和纤毛门表现出了高的局域α多样性和低的区域β多样性模式。与动植物一样，原生生物在 OTU 和系统发育水平上表现出了森林之间的空间结构，而仅在系统发育水平上表现出了森林内的空间结构。这些结果表明，新热带低地雨林中宏观和微观真核生物的生物地理学特征部分是由相同的一般过程所决定的。然而，与动植物不同的是，原生生物的 OTU 并没有表现出森林内的空间结构，这限制了我们估计热带森林中原生生物的局域和区域多样性的能力。
