Abundance of microorganisms and enzyme activity in the rapids-pool-benchland systems in natural Douliu River of China
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Ecosystem Science, Environmental Sciences, Microbiology
- Keywords
- Natural rivers, rapids, benchlands, microorganisms, enzyme activity, sediments, pools, Duliu River
- Copyright
- © 2017 Wang 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
- 2017. Abundance of microorganisms and enzyme activity in the rapids-pool-benchland systems in natural Douliu River of China. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2712v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2712v1
Abstract
River structures and their ecosystem funtciotns have been greatly destructed due to the human disturbance during the last decades. It is a pressing task to understand the complete structures and ecosystem functions of a natural river to restore the impired river ecosystems. We found a basic structure of a natural river, i.e., the rapid-pool-benchland system, in the previous studies, so we selected the rapid-pool-benchland systems in the upper, middle and lower reaches of Duliu River, a natural river in China and tested the abundance of microorganisms and the enzyme activity in the sediments in these systems. Results indicated that the number of bacteria was far more than ammonifiers, actinomycetes, fungus and denitrifying bacteria in the sediments of all river reaches. In the upper reach, the microbial abundance in the sediments was more than the middle and lower reaches. In each of the rapid-pool-benchland system, the microbial abundance in the sediemnets of the pool was always highest, and that of the rapid was lowest. The catalase activity in the sediments of the benchland was higher than the rapid and pool but the phosphatase activity in the pool was higher than the rapid and benchland. The phosphatas and urease activities were significantly correlated to the abundance of the bacteria, ammonifiers, actinomycetes, fungus and denitrifying bacteria in the sediments. The rapid-pool-benchland system in a river obviously regulates the microbial abundance and the catalase and phosphatase activities in the sediments. However, the abuncance of microorganisms only indicated a 0.434-0.836 level of significant correlatioships with the activity of four enzymes, and further influences biochemical functions.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.
Supplemental Information
supplemental file 1
photos of the rapid-pool-benchland systems