scholarly journals High diatom species turnover in a Baltic Sea rock pool metacommunity

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 2887-2899
Author(s):  
Sonja Aarnio ◽  
Anette Teittinen ◽  
Janne Soininen

AbstractDifferent metacommunity perspectives have been developed to describe the relationship between environmental and spatial factors and their relative roles for local communities. However, only little is known about temporal variation in metacommunities and their underlying drivers. We examined temporal variation in the relative roles of environmental and spatial factors for diatom community composition among brackish-watered rock pools on the Baltic Sea coast over a 3-month period. We used a combination of direct ordination, variation partition, and Mantel tests to investigate the metacommunity patterns. The studied communities housed a mixture of freshwater, brackish, and marine species, with a decreasing share of salinity tolerant species along both temporal and spatial gradients. The community composition was explained by both environmental and spatial variables (especially conductivity and distance from the sea) in each month; the joint effect of these factors was consistently larger than the pure effects of either variable group. Community similarity was related to both environmental and spatial distance between the pools even when the other variable group was controlled for. The relative influence of environmental factors increased with time, accounting for the largest share of the variation in species composition and distance decay of similarity in July. Metacommunity organization in the studied rock pools was probably largely explained by a combination of species sorting and mass effect given the small spatial study scale. The found strong distance decay of community similarity indicates spatially highly heterogeneous diatom communities mainly driven by temporally varying conductivity gradient at the marine-freshwater transition zone.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caio Graco-Roza ◽  
Sonja Aarnio ◽  
Nerea Abrego ◽  
Alicia T. R. Acosta ◽  
Janne Alahuhta ◽  
...  

AbstractUnderstanding the variation in community composition and species abundances, i.e., β-diversity, is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional turnover in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distances. We provide the first global synthesis of taxonomic and functional distance decay along spatial and environmental distance by analysing 149 datasets comprising different types of organisms and environments. We modelled an exponential distance decay for each dataset using generalized linear models and extracted r2 and slope to analyse the strength and the rate of the decay. We studied whether taxonomic or functional similarity has stronger decay across the spatial and environmental distances. We also unveiled the factors driving the rate of decay across the datasets, including latitude, spatial extent, realm, and organismal features. Taxonomic distance decay was stronger along spatial and environmental distances compared with functional distance decay. The rate of taxonomic spatial distance decay was the fastest in the datasets from mid-latitudes while the rate of functional decay increased with latitude. Overall, datasets covering larger spatial extents showed a lower rate of decay along spatial distances but a higher rate of decay along environmental distances. Marine ecosystems had the slowest rate of decay. This synthesis is an important step towards a more holistic understanding of patterns and drivers of taxonomic and functional β-diversity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Syrie M Hermans ◽  
Hannah L Buckley ◽  
Fiona Curran-Cournane ◽  
Matthew Taylor ◽  
Gavin Lear

ABSTRACT Investigating temporal variation in soil bacterial communities advances our fundamental understanding of the causal processes driving biological variation, and how the composition of these important ecosystem members may change into the future. Despite this, temporal variation in soil bacteria remains understudied, and the effects of spatial heterogeneity in bacterial communities on the detection of temporal changes is largely unknown. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, we evaluated temporal patterns in soil bacterial communities from indigenous forest and human-impacted sites sampled repeatedly over a 5-year period. Temporal variation appeared to be greater when fewer spatial samples per site were analysed, as well as in human-impacted compared to indigenous sites (P < 0.01 for both). The biggest portion of variation in bacterial community richness and composition was explained by soil physicochemical variables (13–24%) rather than spatial distance or sampling time (<1%). These results highlight the importance of adequate spatiotemporal replication when sampling soil communities for environmental monitoring, and the importance of conducting temporal research across a wide variety of land uses. This will ensure we have a true understanding of how bacterial communities change over space and time; the work presented here provides important considerations for how such research should be designed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoliang Jiang ◽  
Wenzhi Liu ◽  
Lunguang Yao ◽  
Guihua Liu ◽  
Yuyi Yang

ABSTRACT The relative importance of local environments and dispersal limitation in shaping denitrifier community structure remains elusive. Here, we collected soils from 36 riverine, lacustrine and palustrine wetland sites on the remote Tibetan Plateau and characterized the soil denitrifier communities using high-throughput amplicon sequencing of the nirS and nirK genes. Results showed that the richness of nirS-type denitrifiers in riverine wetlands was significantly higher than that in lacustrine wetlands but not significantly different from that in palustrine wetlands. There was no clear distinction in nir community composition among the three kinds of wetlands. Irrespective of wetland type, the soil denitrification rate was positively related to the abundance, but not the α-diversity, of denitrifying communities. Soil moisture, carbon availability and soil temperature were the main determinants of diversity [operational taxonomic unit (OTU) number] and abundance of thenirS-type denitrifier community, while water total organic carbon, soil NO3– and soil moisture were important in controlling nirK-type denitrifier diversity and abundance. The nirS community composition was influenced by water electrical conductivity, soil temperature and water depth, while the nirK community composition was affected by soil electrical conductivity. Spatial distance explained more variation in the nirS community composition than in the nirK community composition. Our findings highlight the importance of both environmental filtering and spatial distance in explaining diversity and biogeography of soil nir communities in remote and relatively undisturbed wetlands.


2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 1163-1175 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID LYMER ◽  
JÜRG BRENDAN LOGUE ◽  
CORINA P. D. BRUSSAARD ◽  
ANNE-CLAIRE BAUDOUX ◽  
KATARINA VREDE ◽  
...  

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