Functional and Compositional Stability of Bacterial Metacommunities in Response to Salinity Changes

• Disturbances and environmental change are important factors determining the diversity,composition, and functioning of communities. However, knowledge about how naturalbacterial communities are affected by such perturbations is still sparse. We performeda whole ecosystem manipulation experiment with freshwater rock pools where weapplied salinity disturbances of different intensities. The aim was to test how thecompositional and functional resistance and resilience of bacterial communities,alpha- and beta-diversity and the relative importance of stochastic and deterministiccommunity assembly processes changed along a disturbance intensity gradient.We found that bacterial communities were functionally resistant to all salinity levels (3, 6, and 12 psu) and compositionally resistant to a salinity increase to 3 psu andresilient to increases of 6 and 12 psu. Increasing salinities had no effect on local richnessand evenness, beta-diversity and the proportion of deterministically vs. stochasticallyassembled communities. Our results show a high functional and compositional stabilityof bacterial communities to salinity changes of different intensities both at localand regional scales, which possibly reflects long-term adaptation to environmentalconditions in the study system.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap -- Oceanografi, hydrologi och vattenresurser (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences -- Oceanography, Hydrology and Water Resources (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Biologi -- Mikrobiologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Biological Sciences -- Microbiology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

adaptation

bacteria

community assembly

community composition

community function

disturbances

resistance

salinity

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)