Estimating and mapping ecological processes influencing microbial community assembly
By James C. Stegen, Xueju Lin, Jim K. Fredrickson, Allan E. Konopka. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2015
814 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ecological community assembly is governed by a combination of (i) selection resulting from among-taxa differences in performance; (ii) dispersal resulting from organismal movement; and (iii) ecological drift resulting from stochastic changes in population sizes. The relative importance and nature of these processes can vary across environments. Selection can be homogeneous or variable, and while dispersal is a rate, we conceptualize extreme dispersal rates as two categories; dispersal limitation results from limited exchange of organisms among communities, and homogenizing dispersal results from high levels of organism exchange. To estimate the influence and spatial variation of each process we extend a recently developed statistical framework, use a simulation model to evaluate the accuracy of the extended framework, and use the framework to examine subsurface microbial communities over two geologic formations. For each subsurface community we estimate the degree to which it is influenced by homogeneous selection, variable selection, dispersal limitation, and homogenizing dispersal. Our analyses revealed that the relative influences of these ecological processes vary substantially across communities even within a geologic formation. We further identify environmental and spatial features associated with each ecological process, which allowed mapping of spatial variation in ecological-process-influences. The resulting maps provide a new lens through which ecological systems can be understood; in the subsurface system investigated here they revealed that the influence of variable selection was associated with the rate at which redox conditions change with subsurface depth.
Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61aba311a00a850dc7d61d9fa8a5799aa1aa7f88
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Citations in the corpus
- Soil pH mediates the balance between stochastic and deterministic assembly of bacteria (2018, background): “viously developed null modeling approach [3, 9, 13, 46].”
- Stochastic Community Assembly: Does It Matter in Microbial Ecology? (2017, methodology): “Recently, null-model-based -diversity metrics ( NTI and RCBray) were employed to develop a new null-model-based framework for quantifying various community assembly processes (37, 68, 100, 101, 109) (see below).”
- Dispersal-Based Microbial Community Assembly Decreases Biogeochemical Function (2017, background): “Community assembly processes collectively operate through space and time to determine microbial community composition [3,7,14,15].”