Microbes as Engines of Ecosystem Function: When Does Community Structure Enhance Predictions of Ecosystem Processes?
By E. Graham, J. Knelman, A. Schindlbacher, S. Siciliano, M. Breulmann, A. Yannarell, J. Michael Beman, Guy C. J. Abell, L. Philippot, J. Prosser and 40 more. Frontiers in Microbiology, 2016
616 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microorganisms are vital in mediating the earth’s biogeochemical cycles; yet, despite our rapidly increasing ability to explore complex environmental microbial communities, the relationship between microbial community structure and ecosystem processes remains poorly understood. Here, we address a fundamental and unanswered question in microbial ecology: ‘When do we need to understand microbial community structure to accurately predict function?’ We present a statistical analysis investigating the value of environmental data and microbial community structure independently and in combination for explaining rates of carbon and nitrogen cycling processes within 82 global datasets. Environmental variables were the strongest predictors of process rates but left 44% of variation unexplained on average, suggesting the potential for microbial data to increase model accuracy. Although only 29% of our datasets were significantly improved by adding information on microbial community structure, we observed improvement in models of processes mediated by narrow phylogenetic guilds via functional gene data, and conversely, improvement in models of facultative microbial processes via community diversity metrics. Our results also suggest that microbial diversity can strengthen predictions of respiration rates beyond microbial biomass parameters, as 53% of models were improved by incorporating both sets of predictors compared to 35% by microbial biomass alone. Our analysis represents the first comprehensive analysis of research examining links between microbial community structure and ecosystem function. Taken together, our results indicate that a greater understanding of microbial communities informed by ecological principles may enhance our ability to predict ecosystem process rates relative to assessments based on environmental variables and microbial physiology.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eaf2a2070d0cf7bf9b8a196ea332dbf1b085d07b
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
Citations in the corpus
- Consistent and correctable bias in metagenomic sequencing experiments (2019, background): “…of microbial communities are yielding fundamental new insights into the structure and dynamics of microbial ecosystems and the roles of microbes as drivers of host and ecosystem health (Zeevi et al., 2015; Graham et al., 2016; Knight and Sogin, 2017; Callahan et al., 2017; Lehman et al., 2015).”
- 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].”
- Linking metagenomics to aquatic microbial ecology and biogeochemical cycles (2019, background): “…facing the field of aquatic microbiology is our current inability to sufficiently understandhow themetabolism of single organisms combined with abiotic and biotic interactions shape microbial communities and the ecosystem-scale biogeochemical transformations they mediate (Graham et al. 2016).”
- Stochastic Community Assembly: Does It Matter in Microbial Ecology? (2017, background): “New statistical approaches considering functional diversity within the context of microbial community assembly are also needed (63, 69).”
- Embracing the unknown: disentangling the complexities of the soil microbiome (2017, background): “5) — it is far more difficult to link microbial community data to process rates 84 .”
- Microbial community composition affects soil organic carbon turnover in mineral soils (2017, background): “However, the relationship between microbial community composition and ecosystem processes is still poorly understood, with few experimental studies on ecosystem functions of different soil microbial communities (Graham et al. 2016).”
- Forest Soil Bacteria: Diversity, Involvement in Ecosystem Processes, and Response to Global Change (2017, background): “Microbial communities are vital in mediating the biogeochemical cycles, and an understanding of their role in ecosystem processes is essential for the prediction of the forest response to future environmental conditions (8, 17, 20).”