Because of land use changes, a worldwide decrease in biodiversity is underway, mostly driven by habitat degradation and fragmentation. Increasing landscape connectivity (i.e. the degree to which the landscape facilitates movement between habitat patches) has been proposed as a key landscape-level strategy to counterbalance the negative effects of habitat fragmentation. A robust theoretical and methodological framework has been developed for the concept of connectivity, and an increasing body of empirical evidence supports the relevance of connectivity for biodiversity. However, the framework was built ignoring species that represent the dominant proportion of biodiversity on earth: microorganisms. The extent to which the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks on connectivity can be applied to microorganisms remain unknown. We reviewed existing evidence and analyzed methods to test the influence of connectivity on microorganisms. We included all types of microorganisms, from symbiotic to pathogenic and free-living microorganisms, across all ecosystems. We describe the effect of connectivity on microorganism populations and communities, and identify the limitations and large gaps in current knowledge. Microorganisms can differ from macroorganisms in their response to connectivity due to short (distance less than a meter) dispersal distance of some groups, longer time lag of microorganisms response (possibly accompanied by evolutionary processes) and host association. The latter relies on tight interactions and feedback effects that drive microbial-landscape relationships and lead to possible coadaptation processes. Incorporating the connectivity concept in microbial community assembly rules to preserve the diversity of microbial communities and the ecosystem services they provide could be a crucial step forward in the face of pressing global changes.

中文翻译：

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无形者的景观连通性

由于土地利用的变化，全球范围内的生物多样性正在减少，主要是由于栖息地退化和破碎化。增加景观连通性（即景观促进栖息地斑块之间移动的程度）已被提议作为一个关键的景观级战略，以抵消栖息地破碎化的负面影响。已经为连通性概念开发了一个强大的理论和方法框架，并且越来越多的经验证据支持连通性与生物多样性的相关性。然而，该框架的建立忽略了代表地球上生物多样性主要比例的物种：微生物。现有的连通性概念和方法框架在多大程度上可以应用于微生物仍然未知。我们回顾了现有证据并分析了测试连通性对微生物影响的方法。我们涵盖了所有生态系统中的所有类型的微生物，从共生到致病和自由生活的微生物。我们描述了连通性对微生物种群和群落的影响，并确定了当前知识的局限性和巨大差距。由于某些群体的分散距离短（距离小于一米），微生物响应的时间滞后较长（可能伴随着进化过程）和宿主关联，因此微生物对连通性的反应可能与大型生物不同。后者依赖于驱动微生物-景观关系并导致可能的共适应过程的紧密相互作用和反馈效应。