Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity

By K. Locey, J. Lennon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016

987 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Ecological scaling laws are intensively studied for their predictive power and universal nature but often fail to unify biodiversity across domains of life. Using a global-scale compilation of microbial and macrobial data, we uncover relationships of commonness and rarity that scale with abundance at similar rates for microorganisms and macroscopic plants and animals. We then show a unified scaling law that predicts the abundance of dominant species across 30 orders of magnitude to the scale of all microorganisms on Earth. Using this scaling law combined with the lognormal model of biodiversity, we predict that Earth is home to as many as 1 trillion (1012) microbial species. Scaling laws underpin unifying theories of biodiversity and are among the most predictively powerful relationships in biology. However, scaling laws developed for plants and animals often go untested or fail to hold for microorganisms. As a result, it is unclear whether scaling laws of biodiversity will span evolutionarily distant domains of life that encompass all modes of metabolism and scales of abundance. Using a global-scale compilation of ∼35,000 sites and ∼5.6⋅106 species, including the largest ever inventory of high-throughput molecular data and one of the largest compilations of plant and animal community data, we show similar rates of scaling in commonness and rarity across microorganisms and macroscopic plants and animals. We document a universal dominance scaling law that holds across 30 orders of magnitude, an unprecedented expanse that predicts the abundance of dominant ocean bacteria. In combining this scaling law with the lognormal model of biodiversity, we predict that Earth is home to upward of 1 trillion (1012) microbial species. Microbial biodiversity seems greater than ever anticipated yet predictable from the smallest to the largest microbiome.

Subfields: Ecology, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fe682858d6447a2a9315668a4969a1e8a30dc50

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Citations in the corpus

Four priority areas to advance invasion science in the face of rapid environmental change (2020, background): “Locey and Lennon (2016) predict that the Earth may support as many as a staggering 1 trillion (1012) microbial species.”
Where less may be more: how the rare biosphere pulls ecosystems strings (2017, background): “Microscopic organisms, both eukaryotic and prokaryotic, display a huge biodiversity (Locey and Lennon, 2016).”
Rare microbial taxa as the major drivers of ecosystem multifunctionality in long-term fertilized soils (2020, background): “Recently, rare species as the vulnerable components on Earth are increasingly recognized as drivers of key functions in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and even in host-associated microbiomes (Jousset et al., 2017).”
Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges (2020, background): “In general, the sizediversity relationship initially described for macroorganisms was also evidenced for microbial communities in various ecosystems [91, 92].”
The microbiome and human cancer (2021, background): “Of the estimated ~1012 distinct microbial species on Earth (35), just 11 are labeled human carcinogens, or “oncomicrobes,” by the International Association for Cancer Registries (IACR) (36).”
Uncultivated microbes in need of their own taxonomy (2017, background): “The exact number of bacterial and archaeal species (that is, the prokaryotes) on the planet remains an unresolved issue of considerable debate with estimates ranging from millions to trillions (Amann and Rossello-Mora, 2016; Locey and Lennon, 2016; Schloss et al., 2016).”