Life Underfoot: Microbial biodiversity takes surprising twist

To the naked eye, a tropical rainforest bursts impressively with biodiversity, and a desert is just as impressively short on it. But a new study suggests that at the microscopic level in soil, the situation is reversed. Dirt in a rainforest is a veritable desert of bacterial species, whereas bacterial biodiversity blooms in desert dirt.

Scientists know little about the distribution of microbial species across the globe, says Noah Fierer, a soil microbiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.