ArticleEnvironmental microbiology2019
A low proportion of rare bacterial taxa responds to abiotic changes compared with dominant taxa.
Article in Environmental microbiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A Matter of Metals: Copper but Not Cadmium Affects the Microbial Alpha-Diversity of Soils and Sediments - a Meta-analysis.Microbial ecology · 2023Pooled it
- Environmental change increases the contribution of rare microbial species to ecosystem functioning in agricultural soils.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Rare taxa enhance microbial network complexity and drive nitrification and denitrification processes in river ecosystems.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- The Influence of Agroecological Intensification on Dominant and Rare Microbial Communities Across Diverse European Countries.Microbial ecology · 2025Article
- Historical Land Use Drives Present Microbial Community Assembly in an Extreme Environment.Environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Rare taxa as the major drivers of the secondary metabolite accumulation in Rheum tanguticum.BMC plant biology · 2025Article
- Soil pH Determining the Assembly Processes of Abundant and Rare Bacterial Communities in Response to Cultivation Modes in Lemon Farmlands.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Enhancing Biodiversity-Function Relationships in Field Retting: Towards Key Microbial Indicators for Retting Control.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Article
- An in Planta Enrichment Route to Identify Bacterial Root Endophytes.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Article
- Quantifying the contribution of the rare biosphere to natural disturbances.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Discovery and cultivation of prokaryotic taxa in the age of metagenomics and artificial intelligence.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- The life strategy of bacteria rather than fungi shifts in karst tiankeng island-like systems.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Large scale exploration reveals rare taxa crucially shape microbial assembly in alkaline lake sediments.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2024Article
- Unraveling the spatial-temporal distribution patterns of soil abundant and rare bacterial communities in China's subtropical mountain forest.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- Establishment of microbial model communities capable of removing trace organic chemicals for biotransformation mechanisms research.Microbial cell factories · 2023Article
- Article
- Those Nematode-Trapping Fungi That are not Everywhere: Hints Towards Soil Microbial Biogeography.Journal of microbiology (Seoul, Korea) · 2023Article
- Coriander (Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Ecological differentiation and assembly processes of abundant and rare bacterial subcommunities in karst groundwater.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- Temporal dynamics of geothermal microbial communities in Aotearoa-New Zealand.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In many studies, rare bacterial taxa have been found to increase in response to environmental changes. These changes have been proposed to contribute to the insurance of ecosystem functions. However, it has not been systematically tested if rare taxa are more likely to increase in abundance than dominant taxa. Here, we study whether rare soil bacterial taxa are more likely to respond to environmental disturbances and if rare taxa are more opportunistic than dominant taxa. To test this, we applied nine different disturbance treatments to a grassland soil and observed changes in bacterial community composition over 7 days. While 12% of the dominant taxa changed in abundance, only 1% of the rare taxa showed any effect. Rare taxa increased in response to a single disturbance treatment only, while dominant taxa responded to up to five treatments. We conclude that rare taxa are not more likely to contribute to community dynamics after disturbances than dominant taxa. Nevertheless, as rare taxa outnumber abundant taxa with here 230 taxa that changed significantly, the chance is high that some of these rare taxa might act as ecologically important keystone taxa. Therefore, rare and abundant taxa might both contribute to ecosystem insurance.
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