Effects of Dispersal and Initial Diversity on the Composition and Functional Performance of Bacterial Communities.

ABSTRACT: Natural communities are open systems and consequently dispersal can play an important role for the diversity, composition and functioning of communities at the local scale. It is, however, still unclear how effects of dispersal differ depending on the initial diversity of local communities. Here we implemented an experiment where we manipulated the initial diversity of natural freshwater bacterioplankton communities using a dilution-to-extinction approach as well as dispersal from a regional species pool. The aim was further to test whether dispersal effects on bacterial abundance and functional parameters (average community growth rates, respiration rates, substrate utilisation ability) differ in dependence of the initial diversity of the communities. First of all, we found that both init

SUBMITTER: Zha Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4868275 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature