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. 2017 Jun 8:8:948.
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.00948. eCollection 2017.

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

Mercè Berga  1   2 , Yinghua Zha  1 , Anna J Székely  1 , Silke Langenheder  1
Affiliations

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

Mercè Berga et al. Front Microbiol. .

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 a salinity increase to 3 psu and resilient to increases of 6 and 12 psu. Increasing salinities had no effect on local richness and evenness, beta-diversity and the proportion of deterministically vs. stochastically assembled communities. Our results show a high functional and compositional stability of bacterial communities to salinity changes of different intensities both at local and regional scales, which possibly reflects long-term adaptation to environmental conditions in the study system.

Keywords: adaptation; bacteria; community assembly; community composition; community function; disturbances; resistance; salinity.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Changes in (A) community composition (ΔBray–Curtis), (B) species richness (ΔS.Obs), (C) evenness (ΔE), (D) carbon substrate utilization rates (ΔCSUR), and (E) respiration rates (ΔRespiration) between T0 and T65 (filled symbols) as measurement of resistance and between T0 and T160 (empty symbols) as a measurement of resilience at the different salinity levels. Dashed lines indicate the “0 value” (no change). Error bars indicate standard errors. ANOVA results are indicated as follow: T, time; S, salinity; T × S indicates the interaction. ∗∗∗p < 0.001, ∗∗p < 0.01, ∗p < 0.05, •p < 0.1, and ns, not significant.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Changes in the relative abundance of sequences associated to the main bacterial phyla, families and genera over time and between salinity levels. Error bars indicate standard errors.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Changes in beta-diversity based on the average Bray–Curtis dissimilarity (A) and proportion of deterministically assembled pairs of communities (proportion of determinism) (B) over time and between salinity levels. Error bars indicate standard error. ANOVA results are indicated as follow: T, time; S, salinity; T × S indicates the interaction. ∗∗∗p < 0.001, ∗∗p < 0.01, ∗p < 0.05, and ns, not significant.
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