Abstract
The soil as a natural resource and the habitat of microbial diversity hasa number of global functions in the biosphere. Under the impact of unregulated industrial activity of human in the process of fulfillment of socialeconomic processes soil and water undergo a range of changes that lead tosoil erosion, degradation and water pollution. High levels of human activities to the environment is particularly apparent in the urban areas. Currently,the soil and water in settlements and rural districts are significantly differentfrom those in natural ecosystems. There is no doubt that anthropogenic pollution of the environment dictates the need to develop new reliable, shortterm and replicable methods to assess the toxicity of soil and water,which ismajor environmental components. The study is devoted to evaluate microbial diversity in soil and water samples from Atyrau and Mangystauregions,Kazakhstan. According to the results, the microbial landscape in samplesfrom Atyrau and Mangystauregions showed that the qualitative compositionis rather monotonous, and the number of microorganisms in these samplesdoes not exceed 104 CFU/g. All this testifies to the fact that the bacteriallandscape in the concerned region is relatively poor both in quantitativeand qualitative composition, which undoubtedly negatively influence onthe processes of natural self-purification of soil ecosystems, as for bacterialgroups as a conditional number of criteria adopted by the value should benot less than 1 million cells in 1 g of the substrate, i.e. only such number ofmicrobes may have important ecological value.Key words: microbial diversity, soil, water, anthropogenic impact,ecology, bioassay.