Perspectives on the Impact of Sampling Design and Intensity on Soil Microbial Diversity Estimates.

ABSTRACT: Soil bacterial communities have long been recognized as important ecosystem components, and have been the focus of many local and regional studies. However, there is a lack of data at large spatial scales, on the biodiversity of soil microorganisms; national or more extensive studies to date have typically consisted of low replication of haphazardly collected samples. This has led to large spatial gaps in soil microbial biodiversity data. Using a pre-existing dataset of bacterial community composition across a 16-km regular sampling grid in France, we show that the number of detected OTUs changes little under different sampling designs (grid, random, or representative), but increases with the number of samples collected. All common OTUs present in the full dataset were detected when analyz

SUBMITTER: Hermans SM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6692435 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature