Montane ecosystems are often biodiversity hotspots and are undergoing rapid changes as global temperatures rise. Because temperature often varies systematically with elevation in mountains, examining biodiversity patterns along elevational gradients can provide insight into how communities respond to climate over long time periods and large scales. However, most studies on montane communities and elevation have focused on aboveground organisms or single groups of soil taxa, such as bacteria, despite the fact that belowground food webs typically involve complex interactions occurring across multiple trophic levels. We investigated how soil bacterial, fungal, and invertebrate diversity varies between high and low elevations globally. Five samples were metabarcoded per elevation from each of nine sites (Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Greenland, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, USA).
Results/Conclusions
Although we expected that higher elevation sites would have lower diversity due to temperature limitations and would be more similar in community composition to each other than to low elevation sites, elevation did not significantly affect either α or β diversity. Diversity did vary substantially across countries, although responses differed among the three groups of taxa. For example, sites in Sweden, Switzerland, and Greenland were clustered together, as were sites in Australia and New Zealand, when examining β diversity of bacteria, but similar patterns were not observed for fungi and invertebrates. Our results suggest that geographic location (i.e., country), and interactions between geographic location and elevation are stronger drivers of soil biodiversity than elevation alone and that patterns of biodiversity in montane ecosystems are not consistent among soil taxa.