ARPHA Preprints, doi: 10.3897/arphapreprints.e131718
Diversity Restated: >99.9% of Global Species in Soil Biota
expand article infoRobert J. Blakemore
‡ Kanagawa Prefectural Museum, Odawara, Japan
Open Access
Abstract

Recent dawning and the uptake expansion of rapid genomic sequencing has radically transformed our understanding of the biosphere, especially casting a new light in relation to soils. Williamson et al. (2017) concluded: “Soils represent the greatest reservoir of biodiversity on the planet; prokaryotic diversity in soils is estimated to be three orders of magnitude greater than in all other ecosystems combined.” In other words, soils may contain >99.9% of species, mainly microbes. Supporting this were, for example, Bickel & Or (2020) and Zhao et al (2022) who found: “soil is the most microbiologically abundant (1029) and diverse (1011) environment on the Earth” and, in their figure 3A, these latter authors showed soil taxa at >10× that of the ocean, i.e., >90% diversity in Soil vs Ocean. Independently, Blakemore (2022) estimated the Soil Realm is home to ~2.1 x 1024 taxa supporting >99.9% of global species biodiversity, mostly Bacteria, Archaea or other microbes, based upon topographic extrapolation of field data.

Keywords
Global biodiversity, Soil biota, microbes, genomics