Disentangling the spatial patterns in community composition of prokaryotic and eukaryotic lake plankton

Abstract

We sampled 100 small lakes in Finland for bacterio-, phyto-, and zooplankton. The lakes were located in five drainage systems, 20 lakes for each system. We tested two main predictions: that the correlation between community similarity and geographical distance (spatial distance decay) is stronger at the across-drainage than at the within-drainage system scale, and that spatial distance decay is strongest for zooplankton and weakest for bacteria. We used a combination of direct ordination, multivariate statistical tests, and distance-based approaches to examine spatial patterns in our data. Our analyses confirmed both of our predictions. Spatial distance decay was scale-dependent; communities were overall weakly spatially structured within the drainage systems, yet distance decay was significant for all planktonic groups across drainage systems. Spatial distance decay was stronger for zooplankton, with higher slopes and shorter halving distances, than for phytoplankton and bacteria. These results provide evidence that distance decay of similarity is related to study scale, environment, and organism characteristics. Planktonic communities may be controlled by both dispersal-driven assembly and local ecological determinism, with the balance between these two forces depending on study scale.

Distance-Decay Relationship for Biological Wastewater Treatment Plants

“…The z value for different functional and phylogenetic groups was Ͻ0.0066, which is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude lower than those reported in previous studies (3,(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). For example, Martiny et al (3) demonstrated that z values for Nitrosomonadales in salt marsh sediments varied significantly among spatial scales, with z values of 0.02 within marshes, z values of 0.14 within regions (across marshes), and no significant z value at the continental scale (across regions), using 16S rRNA gene-based PCR cloning and sequencing approaches.…”

“…Zhou et al (2) suggested that, based on data from GeoChip analysis, the z value for microbial communities in forest soil was 0.0624, and the z values varied considerably across different functional and phylogenetic groups (z ϭ 0.0475 to 0.0959). Other studies also showed that the z values are typically between 0.01 and 0.1 for microorganisms in various habitats (2,3,(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17). Activated sludge is a unique microbial ecosystem, and it has high diversity, with over 700 genera and thousands of OTUs (32,33).…”

“…In recent years, a number of studies have been conducted to investigate biogeographic patterns of microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea, fungi, and other microbial eukaryotes (3,(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10). A growing body of research has shown that microorganisms, like plants and animals, exhibited distance-decay patterns in different habitats at various taxonomic resolutions (2,3,(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18).The shaping mechanisms of distance-decay patterns in microbial communities can be explained by contemporary environmental heterogeneity and historical events (19). If microbial communities are shaped mainly by contemporary environmental conditions, a distance-decay relationship could be observed because environmental factors tend to be spatially autocorrelated, and microorganisms with different niche preferences are selected from the available pool of taxa as the environment changes with distance.…”

Importance of space and the local environment for linking local and regional abundances of microbes

“…Although the results of spatial predictors are not consistent across data sets, we conclude that dispersal pathways, large scale environmental properties, or different histories of different parts of regions seem to be more important in determining regional invariance than spatial distances or the size of the region per se. This is also what Crump et al (2007) and Soininen et al (2011) concluded from studies on β-diversity of microbial plankton.…”

Biogeography of globally distributed bacteria in temperate and boreal Québec lakes as revealed by tag pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes

“…Our results revealed clear differences in the bacterial communities of lakes distributed over approximately 7° of latitude (approximately 1200 km) in summer and winter. Differences in bacterial community structure did correlate with geographic distance between lakes, indicating that at this spatial scale, the biogeography of temperate and boreal lakes in Québec appears to follow the distance-decay relationship found by previous studies (Horner-Devine et al 2004, Hewson et al 2006, Soininen et al 2011, Jones et al 2012. However, our results also show that differences in community structure among the Québec lakes were dominated by environmental factors.…”