Coupling spatiotemporal community assembly processes to changes in microbial metabolism
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Ecosystem Science, Environmental Sciences, Microbiology, Molecular Biology
- Keywords
- selection, niche, aerobic respiration, dispersal, riverbed, heterotrophy, hyporheic, microbial community structure, ammonia oxidation, Hanford
- Copyright
- © 2016 Graham et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Coupling spatiotemporal community assembly processes to changes in microbial metabolism. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2102v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2102v2
Abstract
Community assembly processes generate shifts in species abundances that influence ecosystem cycling of carbon and nutrients, yet our understanding of assembly remains largely separate from ecosystem-level functioning. Here, we investigate relationships between assembly and changes in microbial metabolism across space and time in hyporheic microbial communities. We pair sampling of two habitat types (i.e., attached and planktonic) through seasonal and sub-hourly hydrologic fluctuation with null modeling and temporally-explicit multivariate statistics. We demonstrate that multiple selective pressures—imposed by sediment and porewater physicochemistry—integrate to generate changes in microbial community composition at distinct timescales among habitat types. These changes in composition are reflective of contrasting associations of Betaproteobacteria and Thaumarchaeota with ecological selection and with seasonal changes in microbial metabolism. We present a conceptual model based on our results in which metabolism increases when oscillating selective pressures oppose temporally-stable selective pressures. Our conceptual model is pertinent to both macrobial and microbial systems experiencing multiple selective pressures and presents an avenue for assimilating community assembly processes into predictions of ecosystem-level functioning.
Author Comment
Revised draft, in review