A species richness test conducted using Chao1 richness estimator showed a drastic decrease of species richness of approximately 97.23 98.48% when comparing the control samples to nCeO2 NP treated samples.
Aside from the overall decrease in richness of phylotypes of bacterial species, certain host conditions appear to be associated with specific changes in the intestinal microbiota and up or down-regulation of certain bacterial species.
This trend was driven by a strong decrease in richness of infrequently encountered species with increasing road length within 1 km from breeding ponds.
Increasing temperature can decrease species richness of communities [ 47], induce changes in community composition and facilitate temporal species turnover [ 48] and decrease community evenness [ 49], but it is clear that there are multiple factors that, in concert with biodiversity, will determine how climate change affects the provision and stability of ecosystem functioning [ 34, 38, 50].
Farmers in this study attributed abusive cutting of trees, decrease in species richness of the vegetation, decline of annual productivity of vegetation and increase in invasive species to transhumant practices.
While a high amount of surrounding arable land decreased species richness of wild bees, richness of all other groups was unaffected.
In the beech forest patches, a large proportion of edge, low tree densities and low levels of variety of woody debris caused a decrease of wood-inhabiting fungal richness.
Forest conversion to agriculture or pasture decreased the species richness of ants and of animals overall, whereas logging did not decrease species richness overall or of ants, birds or lepidoptera.
We found that fertilization altered the community structure; N (but not P or K) addition increased the proportion of perennial rhizome grasses and significantly reduced that of perennial forbs (P<0.05), thus it presented a trend of decrease in species richness, Shannon-Wiener and Pielou indexex, respectively.
Disturbances all had the opposite effect to N-addition causing an increase in species richness and decrease of biomass.
