CEBAS-CSIC. Department of Soil and Water Conservation, Campus Universitario de Espinardo, 30100, Murcia, Spain.
Centre for Ecosystem Studies, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia.
ISME J. 2021 Jul;15(7):2081-2091. doi: 10.1038/s41396-021-00906-0. Epub 2021 Feb 9.
The relationship between biodiversity and biomass has been a long standing debate in ecology. Soil biodiversity and biomass are essential drivers of ecosystem functions. However, unlike plant communities, little is known about how the diversity and biomass of soil microbial communities are interlinked across globally distributed biomes, and how variations in this relationship influence ecosystem function. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a field survey across global biomes, with contrasting vegetation and climate types. We show that soil carbon (C) content is associated to the microbial diversity-biomass relationship and ratio in soils across global biomes. This ratio provides an integrative index to identify those locations on Earth wherein diversity is much higher compared with biomass and vice versa. The soil microbial diversity-to-biomass ratio peaks in arid environments with low C content, and is very low in C-rich cold environments. Our study further advances that the reductions in soil C content associated with land use intensification and climate change could cause dramatic shifts in the microbial diversity-biomass ratio, with potential consequences for broad soil processes.
生物多样性和生物量之间的关系一直是生态学中的一个长期争论点。土壤生物多样性和生物量是生态系统功能的重要驱动因素。然而，与植物群落不同，人们对于全球分布的生物群落中土壤微生物群落的多样性和生物量如何相互关联，以及这种关系的变化如何影响生态系统功能知之甚少。为了填补这一知识空白，我们在全球生物群落中进行了实地调查，这些生物群落具有不同的植被和气候类型。我们表明，土壤碳 (C) 含量与全球生物群落中的土壤微生物多样性-生物量关系和比例有关。该比例提供了一个综合指数，可以识别地球上那些多样性相对于生物量更高的地方，反之亦然。在 C 含量低的干旱环境中，土壤微生物多样性与生物量的比值达到峰值，而在 C 丰富的寒冷环境中则非常低。我们的研究进一步表明，与土地利用集约化和气候变化相关的土壤 C 含量减少可能导致微生物多样性-生物量比值的剧烈变化，从而对广泛的土壤过程产生潜在影响。
