Global diversity of microbial communities in marine sediment
Tatsuhiko Hoshino, Hideyuki Doi, Go‐Ichiro Uramoto, Lars Wörmer, Rishi R. Adhikari, Nan Xiao, Yuki Morono, Steven D’Hondt, Kai‐Uwe Hinrichs, Fumio Inagaki
Abstract
Significance Marine sediment covers 70% of Earth’s surface and harbors as much biomass as seawater. However, the global taxonomic diversity of marine sedimentary communities, and the spatial distribution of that diversity remain unclear. We investigated microbial composition from 40 globally distributed sampling locations, spanning sediment depths of 0.1 to 678 m. Statistical analysis reveals that oxygen presence or absence and organic carbon concentration are key environmental factors for defining taxonomic composition and diversity of marine sedimentary communities. Global marine sedimentary taxonomic richness predicted by species–area relationship models is 7.85 × 10 3 to 6.10 × 10 5 for Archaea and 3.28 × 10 4 to 2.46 × 10 6 for Bacteria as amplicon sequence variants, which is comparable to the richness in seawater and that in topsoil.