Functional and Compositional Stability of Bacterial Metacommunities in Response to Salinity Changes.

ABSTRACT: Disturbances and environmental change are important factors determining the diversity, composition, and functioning of communities. However, knowledge about how natural bacterial communities are affected by such perturbations is still sparse. We performed a whole ecosystem manipulation experiment with freshwater rock pools where we applied salinity disturbances of different intensities. The aim was to test how the compositional and functional resistance and resilience of bacterial communities, alpha- and beta-diversity and the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic community assembly processes changed along a disturbance intensity gradient. We found that bacterial communities were functionally resistant to all salinity levels (3, 6, and 12 psu) and compositionally resistant to

SUBMITTER: Berga M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5463035 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature