Variance in Landscape Connectivity Shifts Microbial Population Scaling.

ABSTRACT: Understanding mechanisms shaping distributions and interactions of soil microbes is essential for determining their impact on large scale ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, climate regulation, waste decomposition, and nutrient cycling. As the functional unit of soil ecosystems, we focus our attention on the spatial structure of soil macroaggregates. Emulating this complex physico-chemical environment as a patchy habitat landscape we investigate on-chip the effect of changing the connectivity features of this landscape as Escherichia coli forms a metapopulation. We analyze the distributions of E. coli occupancy using Taylor's law, an empirical law in ecology which asserts that the fluctuations in populations is a power law function of the mean. We provide

SUBMITTER: Wetherington MT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9020879 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature