Species–area relationships in microbial-mediated mutualisms

Stavros D. Veresoglou*, David Johnson

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Symbioses involving microorganisms prevail in nature and are key to regulating numerous ecosystem processes and in driving evolution. A major concern in understanding the ecology of symbioses involving microorganisms arises in the effectiveness of sampling strategies to capture the contrasting size of organisms involved. In many mutualisms, including mycorrhizas and gut systems, hosts interact simultaneously with multiple smaller sized mutualists, the identity of which determines success for the host. This complicates quantifying the diversity of mutualisms because sampling techniques fail to capture effectively the diversity of each partner. Here we propose the use of species–area relationships (SARs) to explicitly consider the spatial scale of microbial partners in symbioses, which we propose will improve our understanding of the ecology of mutualisms.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1111-1117
Number of pages7
JournalTrends in Microbiology
Volume31
Issue number11
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2023

Keywords

  • arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi
  • community segregation
  • Glomeromycota
  • grey diversity
  • pre-emption
  • species–area relationships

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