Resistance and resilience of microbial communities – temporal and spatial insurance against perturbations

Abstract

Degree project in biology, Master of science (1 year), 2010 Examensarbete i biologi 30 hp till magisterexamen, 2010

The impact of resource dependence of the mechanisms of life on the spatial population dynamics of an in silico microbial community

“…75 We note that the formation of spatial refuges observed in our model is qualitatively different from a phenomenon described as "coexistence by small numbers," which has been observed in other individual-based modelling studies of non-transitive competition. 76 This term refers to the situation where a species collapses to near extinction due to competition effects, but does not disappear completelya very small number of individuals remains present, completely disaggregated from other individuals of the same species, and entirely surrounded by non-competitors (e.g., an individual of species A survives in a neighbourhood consisting entirely of individuals of species B).…”

Resilience and recovery: The effect of triclosan exposure timing during development, on the structure and function of river biofilm communities

“…These characteristics make them highly-relevant and suitable for assessment of resistance-resilience phenomena in aquatic ecosystems (Lawrence et al, 2009;Proia et al, 2011Proia et al, , 2012Sabater et al, 2007). Previous resilience experiments used a variety of community cultivation approaches: artificial channels, mesocosms, as well as in situ cultivation and transplantation to create scenarios of exposure and recovery where return to reference composition and function is monitored using various parameters (Begon et al, 2006;Baho et al, 2012;Proia et al, 2011;Zafar et al, 2012). In the current study the experimental set up used rotating annular reactors (Lawrence et al, 2000) where there was continuous flow-through of river water with metered addition of TCS to achieve a controlled exposure.…”

Sustaining Rare Marine Microorganisms: Macroorganisms As Repositories and Dispersal Agents of Microbial Diversity

“…In theoretical models, this allows maintenance of ecosystem processes at large scale and reduces their variation in variable environmental conditions (Loreau et al, 2003; Hector et al, 2010; Shanafelt et al, 2015); it has been coined as the spatial component of the insurance hypothesis (Loreau et al, 2003; Wang and Loreau, 2014). If we replace the view presented in this article into the metacommunity framework, macroorganisms represent various environmental conditions for microbes and play an important role in microbial dispersal, suggesting they may participate to the spatial insurance (resistance and resilience) of the microbial processes at the metacommunity level (Baho et al, 2012; Mihaljevic, 2012). Additionally, theoretical models predict that changes in connectivity between communities following perturbation may substantially alter both species diversity and ecosystem processes at local and regional spatial scales (Gonzalez and Chaneton, 2002; Mouquet et al, 2003).…”