Microbial Transport and Fate in the Subsurface Environment: Introduction to the Special Section

Abstract

Microorganisms constitute an almost exclusive form of life in the earth's subsurface environment (not including caves), particularly at depths exceeding the soil horizon. While of broad interest to ecology and geology, scientific interest in the fate and transport of microorganisms, particularly those introduced through the anthropogenic environment, has focused on understanding the subsurface environment as a pathway for human pathogens and on optimizing the use of microbial organisms for remediation of potable groundwater. This special section, inspired by the 2014 Ninth International Symposium for Subsurface Microbiology, brings together recent efforts to better understand the spatiotemporal occurrence of anthropogenic microbial groundwater contamination and the fate and transport of microbes in the subsurface environment: in soils, deep unsaturated zones, and within aquifer systems. Work includes field reconnaissance, controlled laboratory studies to improve our understanding of specific fate and transport processes, and the development and application of improved mechanistic understanding of microbial fate and transport processes in the subsurface environment. The findings confirm and also challenge the limitations of our current understanding of highly complex microbial fate and transport processes across spatiotemporal scales in the subsurface environment; they also add to the increasing knowledge base to improve our ability to protect drinking water resources and perform in situ environmental remediation.

Impact of hydrologic boundaries on microbial planktonic and biofilm communities in shallow terrestrial subsurface environments

“… 2004 ; Gargiulo et al . 2007 ; Harvey, Harms and Landkamer 2007 ; Bradford, Schijven and Harter 2015 ). Laboratory experiments are routinely used to mimic and investigate environmental subsurface processes ( i.e .…”

Microbial Water Quality: Monitoring and Modeling

“…Transport in soils and groundwater apparently should remain a concern if microbial water quality can be compromised by the influx of very small concentrations of suspended microorganisms. Various aspects of this phenomenon were recently discussed in a special section of the Journal of Environmental Quality on microbial transport and fate in the subsurface environment (Bradford et al, 2015, and references therein).…”

Characterisation of Organic Matter and Its Transformation Processes in On-Site Wastewater Effluent Percolating through Soil Using Fluorescence Spectroscopic Methods and Parallel Factor Analysis (PARAFAC)

“…However, the exact nature of the dissolved organic matter (DOM) that either pass through or are released from the biomat has received little research, even though it is critical to other contaminant processes such as nitrogen cycling [7,16] and pathogen/viral transport [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Previous studies have assumed that OM facilitates microorganism transport by competing with bacteria (for example) for sediment sorption sites [23][24][25].…”