The Impact of Habitat Fragmentation on the Diversity of Soil Bacterial and Fungal Communities

Author

Benjamin Bryant, Bard CollegeFollow

Date of Submission

Spring 2020

Academic Program

Biology

Project Advisor 1

Cathy Collins

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Habitat fragmentation is known to have important ecological consequences, including for diversity, though much of the previous research has focused on macroscopic organisms. In this study, I examined the diversity in terms of richness, evenness, and phylogenetic relatedness of soil communities of bacteria and fungi at multiple spatial scales using DNA sequences previously extracted from fragments of varying size collected at the Kansas Fragmentation Experiment. For the bacterial data, neither diversity levels nor community composition varied based on sample location. Both weighted and unweighted UniFrac measures, however, indicate that the composition of the communities does differ across the landscape, driven at least in the case of the unweighted UniFrac by differences between the matrix and small clusters.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Bryant, Benjamin, "The Impact of Habitat Fragmentation on the Diversity of Soil Bacterial and Fungal Communities" (2020). Senior Projects Spring 2020. 89.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020/89