A macroecological theory of microbial biodiversity
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
- (April 3, 2017) A peer-reviewed version of this preprint has been published online at Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Author and article information
Abstract
Microorganisms are the most abundant, diverse, and functionally important organisms on Earth. Over the past decade, microbial ecologists have produced the largest ever community datasets. However, these data are rarely used to uncover law-like patterns of commonness and rarity, test theories of biodiversity, or explore unifying explanations for the structure of microbial communities. Using a global-scale compilation of >20,000 samples from environmental, engineered, and host-related ecosystems, we test the power of competing theories to predict distributions of microbial abundance and diversity-abundance scaling laws. We show that these patterns are best explained by the synergistic interaction of stochastic processes that are captured by lognormal dynamics. We demonstrate that lognormal dynamics have predictive power across scales of abundance, a criterion that is essential to biodiversity theory. By understanding the multiplicative and stochastic nature of ecological processes, scientists can better understand the structure and dynamics of Earth’s largest and most diverse ecological systems.
Cite this as
2016. A macroecological theory of microbial biodiversity. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1450v4 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1450v4note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
While the results and findings have not changed, the manuscript was heavily revised for readability and clarity.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
William R Shoemaker conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Kenneth J Locey conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Jay T Lennon wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
https://github.com/LennonLab/MicrobialBiodiversityTheory
Funding
This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Dimensions of Biodiversity Grant (#1442246) awarded to JTL and KJL, and the U.S. Army Research Office (W911NF-14-1-0411 to JTL). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
