Mingshan Xu, Xiaodong Yang, Jie Shao, Junbao Huang, Wenzhou Fan, Anna Yang, Hang Ci, Yongju Wang, Jianjun Gan, Yu Han, Jian Zeng
Island coastal zones are often mistakenly perceived as "ecological desert". Actually, they harbour unique communities of organisms. The biodiversity on islands is primarily influenced by the effects of area and isolation (distance from the mainland), which mainly focused on plants and animals, encompassing studies of entire islands. However, the application of area and isolation effects to soil microorganisms on island beaches across the intertidal zones remains largely unexplored. We hypothesized that island area and isolation shape soil bacterial communities by regulating soil properties on island beaches, due to the fact that local soil properties might be strongly influenced by land-use, which may vary among islands of different sizes and isolations...
April 25, 2024: Science of the Total Environment