Abstract
Abstract: The Neotropics is one of the most diverse regions of the globe in terms of plants and animal species. Regarding the microbial world, however, little is known about the diversity and biogeography patterns of microorganisms in the Neotropics. The biogeography of several microbial taxonomic groups is still missing and/or incomplete, such as the protists. Despite the hard taxonomic identification of protists, the advance of molecular techniques (e.g., metabarcoding) have allowed to better explore the distribution of several protistan groups. Our goal here was to summarize the available information of Neotropical protists, focusing on metabarcoding studies, to explore what these data evidence on their ecology and biogeography. For this, we reviewed the findings from all articles that focused on or included the terrestrial protists using a metabarcoding approach and identified the gaps and future perspectives in this research field. We found that Neotropical protistan diversity patterns seem to be, at least in part, congruent with that of macro-organisms and, different than plants and bacteria, just weakly explained by environmental variables. We argue that studies with standardized protocols including different ecoregions are necessary, such as temperate forests, grasslands, and savannas from Southern of South America and Northern Atlantic Forest, to fully characterize the ecology and biogeography on Neotropical protists. Furthermore, dismembering evolutionary lineages and functional guilds of protists are important to better understand the relationship between diversity, dispersal abilities, and functionality of particular taxa of protists in their habitats.
Highlights
Despite the significant advances in our understanding of biodiversity patterns across a wide spatial scale, the question of whether the same ecological and biogeographical patterns apply to macro and microorganisms remains a discussion topic
We identified the main gaps in the Neotropical protists ecology and biogeography and to shed light on the already described patterns and potential prospects in this so promising study group
While the first proposition implies that microorganisms have dispersal abilities so high that the effects of past processes are suppressed, the second assumes that current environmental characteristics select different microbial taxa according to their habitat preferences (De Wit & Bouvier 2006)
Summary
Despite the significant advances in our understanding of biodiversity patterns across a wide spatial scale, the question of whether the same ecological and biogeographical patterns apply to macro and microorganisms remains a discussion topic. It was considered one of the 100 fundamental ecological questions (Sutherland et al 2013). The hard-taxonomic identification of protists contributes to the lack of sampling in some regions, reflecting the uncertainties on ecological and biogeographic patterns Advanced molecular techniques such as environmental DNA sampling known as metabarcoding brings promising prospects for protists (Santoferrara et al 2020). Let us introduce this group here, who they are, what is known about their ecology, and how molecular techniques such as metabarcoding can bring new advances to the knowledge of this amazing group
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