The global-scale distributions of soil protists and their contributions to belowground systems

Protists are ubiquitous in soil, where they are key contributors to nutrient cycling and energy transfer. However, protists have received far less attention than other components of the soil microbiome. We used amplicon sequencing of soils from 180 locations across six continents to investigate the ecological preferences of protists and their functional contributions to belowground systems. We complemented these analyses with shotgun metagenomic sequencing of 46 soils to validate the identities of the more abundant protist lineages. We found that most soils are dominated by consumers, although parasites and phototrophs are particularly abundant in tropical and arid ecosystems, respectively. The best predictors…

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  Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute