Soil microbial diversity–biomass relationships are driven by soil carbon content across global biomes

Summary

The relationship between biodiversity and biomass has been a long standing debate in ecology. Soil biodiversity and biomass are essential drivers of ecosystem functions. However, unlike plant communities, little is known about how the diversity and biomass of soil microbial communities are interlinked across globally distributed biomes, and how variations in this relationship influence ecosystem function. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a field survey across global biomes, with contrasting vegetation and climate types. We show that soil carbon (C) content is associated to the microbial diversity-biomass relationship and ratio in soils across global biomes. This ratio provides an integrative index to identify those locations on Earth wherein diversity is much higher compared with b