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. “There are all these papers on plant and animal diversity at continental scales going back to Darwin,” but similar surveys hadn’t been carried out for bacteria and other microscopic life forms, he says.