Microbial Ecology Meets Macroecology: Developing a Process‐Based Understanding of the Microbial Role in Global Ecosystems

摘要

Microorganisms inhabit all biomes on Earth. The terrestrial microbiome spans from leaf to soil,including all surrounding organisms, and microbial effects extend across ecological, spatial, and tempo-ral scales. The terrestrial microbiome mediates plant invasions, plant succession, nutrient cycling, andeven ecosystem carbon feedback to the atmosphere. Yet, for far too long, a lack of data constrained theelucidation of macroecological phenomena of terrestrial microbial communities over space and time.However, during the 2000s, breakthroughs in DNA sequencing technology were co- opted by environ-mental microbiologists to look deeper into the terrestrial microbiome than ever before possible. Rapiddeclines in the cost of DNA sequencing technology spurred more than a decade of work to understandspatial patterns of microbial communities (Fierer and Jackson 2006, Amend et al. 2012, Tedersooet al. 2014, Davison et al. 2015). This accumulation of knowledge has enabled new global analyses ofmicrobial communities (Ramirez et al. 2018) and their associated functions (Bahram et al. 2018) in bothspace (Tedersoo et al. 2014) and time (Averill et al. 2019). While discovery science remains an essentialand important part of microbial ecology, these data are pushing the field of microbial macroecologytoward process- and hypothesis- driven science. For example, species distribution models of microbialspecies (Kivlin et al. 2017) and dominant functional groups (Delgado- Baquerizo et al. 2018) allow us toexplicitly include microbial guilds into process- based ecosystem models of carbon and nutrient cycling(Sulman et al. 2019). Furthermore, combining microbial distribution data with that of plants, animals,and humans reveals that microbial associations can influence ecosystem- level processes such as plantnutrient cycling (Mushinski et al. 2019, Averill et al. 2019) and litter decomposition (Steidinger et al.2019), as well as plant community response to global change (Averill et al. 2018, Jo et al. 2019). Thesestudies, among others, demonstrate the critical influence of microorganisms over entire ecosystems andhighlight the need to incorporate microbial interactions with other components of ecosystems if weintend to fully appreciate the fate of global ecological populations, communities, and ecosystems.