Disturbance Regimes Predictably Alter Diversity in an Ecologically Complex Bacterial System.

ABSTRACT: Diversity is often associated with the functional stability of ecological communities from microbes to macroorganisms. Understanding how diversity responds to environmental perturbations and the consequences of this relationship for ecosystem function are thus central challenges in microbial ecology. Unimodal diversity-disturbance relationships, in which maximum diversity occurs at intermediate levels of disturbance, have been predicted for ecosystems where life history tradeoffs separate organisms along a disturbance gradient. However, empirical support for such peaked relationships in macrosystems is mixed, and few studies have explored these relationships in microbial systems. Here we use complex microbial microcosm communities to systematically determine diversity-disturbance relations

SUBMITTER: Gibbons SM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5181773 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature