Diversity Restated: >99.9% of Global Species in Soil Biota

Recent dawning and the uptake expansion of rapid genomic sequencing has radically transformed our understanding of the biosphere, especially casting a new light in relation to soils. Williamson et al. (2017) concluded: “ Soils represent the greatest reservoir of biodiversity on the planet; prokaryotic diversity in soils is estimated to be three orders of magnitude greater than in all other ecosystems combined. ” In other words, soils may contain >99.9% of species, mainly microbes. Supporting this were, for example, Bickel & Or (2020) and Zhao et al (2022) who found : “ soil is the most microbiologically abundant (10 29 ) and diverse (10 11 ) environment on the Earth ” and, in their figure 3A, these latter authors showed soil taxa at >10× that of the ocean, i.e., >90% diversity in Soil vs Ocean. Independently, Blakemore (2022) estimated the Soil Realm is home to ~2.1 x 10 24 taxa supporting >99.9% of global species biodiversity, mostly Bacteria, Archaea or other microbes, based upon topographic extrapolation of field data.