Synchrony in aquatic microbial community dynamics

Abstract

Population dynamics are influenced by drivers acting from outside and from within an ecosystem. Extrinsic forces operating over broad spatial scales can impart synchronous behavior to separate populations, while internal, system-specific drivers often lead to idiosyncratic behavior. Here, we demonstrate synchrony in community-level dynamics among phytoplankton and bacteria in six north temperate humic lakes. The influence of regional meteorological factors explained much of the temporal variability in the phytoplankton community, and resulted in synchronous patterns of community change among lakes. Bacterial dynamics, in contrast, were driven by system-specific interactions with phytoplankton. Despite the importance of intrinsic factors for determining bacterial community composition and dynamics, we demonstrated that biological interactions transmitted the signal of the regional extrinsic drivers to the bacterial communities, ultimately resulting in synchronous community phenologies for bacterioplankton communities as well. This demonstrates how linkages between the components of a complex biological system can work to simplify the dynamics of the system and implies that it may be possible to predict the behavior of microbial communities responsible for important biogeochemical services in the landscape.

Asynchrony of spring phytoplankton response to temperature driver within a spatial heterogeneity bay of Three-Gorges Reservoir, China

“…Lakes provide an excellent system to explore the influence of intrinsic vs extrinsic drivers of microbial communities, since the shoreline boundaries enable one to distinguish forces acting from within and from outside the system (Kent et al, 2007). Previous studies addressing temporal coherence were thus made across a series of distinct lakes at different temporal and spatial scales (Rusak et al, 1999;Baines et al, 2000;Arnott et al, 2003).…”

Treatment performance and microorganism community structure of integrated vertical-flow constructed wetland plots for domestic wastewater

“…In the diagram, Gram + for Gram-positive bacteria abundance, Gram − for Gram-negative bacteria abundance, Anaerobic for anaerobic bacteria abundance; DHA for dehydrogenase, Ure for urease, Nitr for nitrate reductase, Pho for phosphatase pollutants in the constructed wetlands (Ahn et al 2007;Krasnits et al 2009). Microbial community structure has been proposed to be an important determinant of water quality improvement in the wetland systems (Calheiros et al 2009;Faulwetter et al 2009), and temperature (Smith et al 2010), hydrologic regime and pollutant treatments (Mentzer et al 2006;Steenwerth et al 2006), plant diversity and function group richness (Zhang et al 2010 and biotic succession (Kent et al 2007), could strongly influence the microbial community structure. In the present study, the effects of microbial community structure (four diagnostic fatty acid (FA) groups) and environmental parameters on pollutant removal efficiencies were also determined by RDA (Fig.…”

Patterns of asynchrony for phytoplankton fluctuations from reservoir mainstream to a tributary bay in a giant dendritic reservoir (Three Gorges Reservoir, China)

“…Xu et al (2009a) evaluated the temporal coherence of spring chlorophyll a (a good indicator of algal blooms) in a small-scale system (Xiangxi Bay, TGR) and confirmed the dominance of local-scale regulators on phytoplankton spring blooms. Nevertheless, synchrony of the succession of community composition has been rarely detected during the long term (Kent et al 2007;Rusak et al 2009). Further, detection of phytoplankton synchrony accounting for community composition is necessary to determine whether local-scale regulators or regional drivers play a key role on phytoplankton dynamics (Xu et al 2011a) because the variability of all natural communities may be measured by two distinct but related quantities: aggregate variability (total abundance) and compositional variability (community composition) (Brown and Lawson 2010).…”