Outdoor climate drives diversity patterns of dominant microbial taxa in caves worldwide
Author(s)
Date Issued
January 2024
Type
article
Volume
906
ISSN
0048-9697
Journal
Abstract
The cave microbiota is assumed to be shaped by indoor microclimate, biotic and abiotic factors, which are largely
dependent from outside environmental conditions; however, this knowledge is available at local or regional
scales only. To address this knowledge gap, we reanalyzed over 1050 bacterial and fungal communities of caves
worldwide, and found that outdoor temperature and rainfall play a critical role in explaining differences in
microbial diversity patterns of global caves, selecting specific dominant taxa across gradients of growing aridity
conditions with arid climate leading to a reduction in total cave microbial diversity. Moreover, we found that
fungal (from 186 to 1908 taxa) and bacterial (from 467 to 1619 taxa) diversity increased under temperatetropical
and temperate-continental climatic regions, respectively, highlighting an opposite preference for the
two microbial compartments. We hypothesized that outdoor geographical, climatic variables and lithology are
critical epistatic drivers in assembling microbial communities and their dominant taxa, whose ecological
responses could be useful to predict the fate of these subterranean environments in the context of climate change.
Our work elucidates the intimate connection between caves microbiota and surface ecosystems highlighting the
sensitivity of cave microbial communities to climatic changes and environmental degradation. This work also
provides a natural benchmark for the biogeographic information for caves globally and for protection strategies
aiming at conservation of underground environments.
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Name
Biagioli et al., 2024 Scientific Reports s41598-022-26511-5.pdf
Size
4.81 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ac1606719b6a63ac8074ed4775b655b4