On World Soil Day, scientists warn of underground extinction risks - It’s time for ecologists and conservation biologists to dig deeper
into dirt- in order to better understand the threats facing soil
creatures that are key to healthy ecosystems and our food supply, and
that might offer a rich source of potential antibiotics.
That call to expand studies of oft-neglected underground biodiversity is included in a new collection of papers timed to highlight World Soil Day, which is being celebrated today.
“Despite marked progress over the last few decades, currently soil
ecology still lags far behind aboveground ecology, and our knowledge of
the world belowground is comparatively limited,” soil ecologist Stavros
Veresoglou of the Free University of Berlin and colleagues conclude in
one of the papers, appearing in Nature Communications. In particular, they note, studies of the extinction risks faced by soil organisms “are alarmingly sparse.”
“We need to be studying extinctions in soil and the time to start is now,” says Matthias Rillig,
a co-author of the paper and a soil microbiologist at the Free
University of Berlin. “Given what we’re doing to the planet in terms of
land use and global climate change, there is a concern among soil
scientists that we may be missing something going on.”
Already, the authors note, some studies have documented local extinctions of earthworms and wood-decomposing fungi because
of species invasions or changing environmental conditions. But
researchers have tended to downplay the risks of soil extinctions, in
part because of the perception that soil microbes and other subterranean
organisms are widely distributed around the globe. In many places,
however, scientists have little idea of what is living in the soil or
the novel roles played by individual organisms.
Now, soil scientists say a suite of new tools, including advanced DNA
sequencing methods that can determine how many types of microbes are
living in a sample of dirt or water, could help researchers fill in the
gaps. Some researchers, for instance, are using such tools to uncover
the so-called rare biosphere-the large number of diverse microbes that persist in low abundance in a soil sample.
“If we can get a handle on rare biosphere, we might be able to say if there is or is there not any extinction,” says Jonathan Eisen,
a microbiologist at University of California, Davis. But one challenge
is that sequencing tools can’t determine whether the detected DNA came
from a living or dead organism. And because microbes can multiply
rapidly, their populations can change with the season or the weather.
Just because something is rare now doesn’t mean it is rare at some other
time, Eisen notes.
Inspiring scientists to launch studies to better understand such
dynamics is just one of the goals of World Soil Day, which is helping
cap a year-long research and outreach initiative known as the International Year of Soils.
Eisen, for one, laments not being able to jump into a soil submarine to
explore underground, the way marine biologists examine the deep sea.
But he and other researchers say that, until someone invents such a
craft, there are plenty of other ways we can better understand what’s
going on beneath our feet, if we just take the time to look. Source: Sciencemag
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