Corresponding author: Robert Blakemore ( rob.blakemore@gmail.com ) © Robert Blakemore. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Blakemore RJ (2024) Diversity Restated: >99.9% of Global Species in Soil Biota. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e131718 |
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.