713 Lecture 1 Microbial biogeography and diversity

“Everything is everywhere, the environment selects”

Everything is everywhere? ProsCons

Pros and cons, bacterial ubiquity Pros High dispersal rate (?) Extremely fine partitioning of the environment Extreme abundance ?? Extreme resistance to variable conditions; dormancy, spores Side effect: ease of study because they’re everywhere Blurring of species identity by HGT/LGT (horizontal gene transfer) Cons Not all environments can be alike (e.g. temperature, pH, pressure, elevation) Past measurements of diversity too coarse Dispersal not as efficient as once thought There is a difference between short-term presence and persistence following dispersal Limited previous knowledge of species diversity Inadequacy of prior methods (culture-dependent)

How do you test for cosmopolitanism or endemism? Sampling – does sample absence = true absence? (what is your null model?) Distance-decay relationship –Does community similarity change with geographic distance? Taxa-area relationship –Does total diversity change with area, and at what rate?

Taxa-area relationships

Why differences between continents and islands? raphyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_biogeog raphy In your words? What about microbes?

Calculating TA curves No generalizations possible, but a power- law relationship can be assumed, i.e. S = A z 0.1 < z < 0.3, in general, but steeper for islands (.25 < z <.35). Why? What is z like for microorganisms? How does classification method affect z?

So almost everything is everywhere (low z values) What about in more extreme environments?