Publication Details |
| Category | Text Publication |
| Reference Category | Journals |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.soilbio.2026.110355 |
Licence  |
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| Title (Primary) | The illusion of diversity: sampling design drives conflicting estimates of soil bacterial richness |
| Author | Kostakou, M.; Neiße, N.; Goldmann, K.
; Chatzinotas, A.; Jurburg, S.D. |
| Source Titel | Soil Biology & Biochemistry |
| Year | 2026 |
| Department | SIE; AME; AECOL |
| Volume | art. 110355 |
| Language | englisch |
| Topic | T7 Bioeconomy T5 Future Landscapes |
| Supplements | Supplement 1 |
| Keywords | Soil microbial diversity; Spatial scale; Sampling design; Composite sampling; Sequencing depth; 16S rRNA gene metabarcoding |
| Abstract | Soil microbial communities vary strongly over small spatial scales, yet multiple soil cores are commonly pooled into a single sample to represent a larger area. We sampled 57 forest and grassland plots across three German regions and used 16S rRNA gene metabarcoding to test how the number and spatial arrangement of cores affect bacterial richness. Plot-level richness continued to increase as more cores were included, while the additional effect of spatial extent was comparatively small. To distinguish the effect of adding more cores from the effect of sequencing more reads, we also compared samples using the same number of reads. Under this constraint, each additional core contributed less detectable richness, while the likelihood of detecting previously unseen taxa with further sequencing increased. Pooling soil across cores had an even larger effect: composite samples retained only 33.1% of the richness detected across corresponding cores in forests and 62.5% in grasslands. Notably, the ecosystem pattern was reversed: richness accumulated across individual cores was higher in forests, whereas richness measured in physically composited samples was higher in grasslands. Our findings show that sampling design can alter not only the diversity detected but also the ecological patterns inferred from it. Accordingly, decisions about core number, spatial extent, sequencing effort relative to sampling effort, and the physical compositing and DNA extraction workflow should be considered jointly and guided by the ecological question being addressed. |
| Kostakou, M., Neiße, N., Goldmann, K., Chatzinotas, A., Jurburg, S.D. (2026): The illusion of diversity: sampling design drives conflicting estimates of soil bacterial richness Soil Biol. Biochem. art. 110355 10.1016/j.soilbio.2026.110355 |
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