The DOI matches its Crossref record; 41 of the 41 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Microbes do not follow the elevational diversity patterns of plants and animals
Open accessAbstract
The elevational gradient in plant and animal diversity is one of the most widely documented patterns in ecology and, although no consensus explanation exists, many hypotheses have been proposed over the past century to explain these patterns. Historically, research on elevational diversity gradients has focused almost exclusively on plant and animal taxa. As a result, we do not know whether microbes exhibit elevational gradients in diversity that parallel those observed for macroscopic taxa. This represents a key knowledge gap in ecology, especially given the ubiquity, abundance, and functional importance of microbes. Here we show that, across a montane elevational gradient in eastern Peru, bacteria living in three distinct habitats (organic soil, mineral soil, and leaf surfaces) exhibit no significant elevational gradient in diversity (r2<0.17, P>0.1 in all cases), in direct contrast to the significant diversity changes observed for plant and animal taxa across the same montane gradient (r2>0.75, P<0.001 in all cases). This finding suggests that the biogeographical patterns exhibited by bacteria are fundamentally different from those of plants and animals, highlighting the need for the development of more inclusive concepts and theories in biogeography to explain these disparities.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
TOWARD A METABOLIC THEORY OF ECOLOGY
Brown, J. H., Gillooly, J. F., Allen, A. P., Savage, V. M., & West, G. B. (2004) · Ecology · doi:10.1890/03-9000 · Cited by 7,779
The diversity and biogeography of soil bacterial communities
Fierer, N., & Jackson, R. B. (2006) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0507535103 · Cited by 5,711
Self-citationConservation evaluation and phylogenetic diversity
Faith, D. P. (1992) · Biological Conservation · doi:10.1016/0006-3207(92)91201-3 · Cited by 5,693
Soil bacterial and fungal communities across a pH gradient in an arable soil
Rousk, J., Bååth, E., Brookes, P. C., Lauber, C. L., Lozupone, C., Caporaso, J. G., Knight, R., & Fierer, N. (2010) · The ISME Journal · doi:10.1038/ismej.2010.58 · Cited by 4,223
Self-citationLauber, C. L., Hamady, M., Knight, R., & Fierer, N. (2009) · Applied and Environmental Microbiology · doi:10.1128/aem.00335-09 · Cited by 4,063
Self-citationGlobal patterns in biodiversity
Gaston, K. J. (2000) · Nature · doi:10.1038/35012228 · Cited by 3,355
Bacterial Community Variation in Human Body Habitats Across Space and Time
Costello, E. K., Lauber, C. L., Hamady, M., Fierer, N., Gordon, J. I., & Knight, R. (2009) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1177486 · Cited by 3,231
Self-citationLozupone, C. A., Hamady, M., Kelley, S. T., & Knight, R. (2007) · Applied and Environmental Microbiology · doi:10.1128/aem.01996-06 · Cited by 2,656
Self-citationNiche Conservatism: Integrating Evolution, Ecology, and Conservation Biology
Wiens, J. J., & Graham, C. H. (2005) · Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics · doi:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.36.102803.095431 · Cited by 2,615
ENERGY, WATER, AND BROAD-SCALE GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS OF SPECIES RICHNESS
Hawkins, B. A., Field, R., Cornell, H. V., Currie, D. J., Guégan, J.-F., Kaufman, D. M., Kerr, J. T., Mittelbach, G. G., Oberdorff, T., O'Brien, E. M., et al. (2003) · Ecology · doi:10.1890/03-8006 · Cited by 2,451
Cited by
Diversity is the question, not the answer
Shade, A. (2017) · The ISME Journal · doi:10.1038/ismej.2016.118 · Cited by 466
Siles, J. A., & Margesin, R. (2016) · Microbial Ecology · doi:10.1007/s00248-016-0748-2 · Cited by 398
Roux, S., Emerson, J. B., Eloe-Fadrosh, E. A., & Sullivan, M. B. (2017) · PeerJ · doi:10.7717/peerj.3817 · Cited by 319
Metadata
- Authors
- Fierer, N., McCain, C. M., Meir, P., Zimmermann, M., Rapp, J. M., Silman, M. R., & Knight, R.
- Venue
- Ecology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2011-04
- Volume
- 92
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 797-804
- ISSN
- 0012-9658 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2160762717
- Cited by
- 396
- References
- 41
- FWCI
- 10.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Microbes do not follow the elevational diversity patterns of plants and animals. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1890/10-1170.1
- The paper
- Fierer, N., McCain, C. M., Meir, P., Zimmermann, M., Rapp, J. M., Silman, M. R., & Knight, R. (2011). Microbes do not follow the elevational diversity patterns of plants and animals. Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1890/10-1170.1
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
