Abstract
A major goal of metacommunity ecology is to infer the local- and regional-scale processes that underlie community assembly. In dendritic ecological networks, branching patterns and directional flow can alter the balance between local and regional factors during assembly. Vertical habitat structure may further affect community assembly in dendritic metacommunities. In this study, we analyzed the bacterial metacommunity of a fifth-order mountain stream network to assess differences in community assembly (1) between planktonic and benthic habitats, (2) across spatial scales, and (3) between headwater and downstream regions of the network. Using taxonomic and phylogenetic null modeling, we found habitat-specific spatial patterns of community assembly across the dendritic network. Compositional differences between planktonic and benthic communities were maintained by variable selection, but we also found evidence of local dispersal limitation between the two habitats. Planktonic community assembly was scale dependent, transitioning from homogeneous selection at local scales to variable selection at regional scales, while benthic community assembly was less scale dependent. Variable selection structured headwaters in both habitat types, but downstream communities were primarily structured by homogeneous selection, especially in sediments. Taken together, our results show that vertical habitat structure contributes to the scale-dependent processes of community assembly across the dendritic metacommunity.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Adam Ward for logistical and financial support during sample collection, and Annie Bowling for technical assistance. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DEB-1442246, JTL), US Army Research Office Grant (W911NF-14-1-0411, JTL), and the Department of Biology at Indiana University (George W. Brackenridge Fellowship, Louise Constable Hoover Fellowship to NIW). Data and code for the project is archived at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (BioProject PRJNA606285) and in a Zenodo archive (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4052168) of the GitHub repository (https://github.com/LennonLab/HJA-streams). LIDAR Data and facilities were provided by the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest and Long-Term Ecological Research program, administered cooperatively by the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, Oregon State University, and the Willamette National Forest. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DEB-1440409.
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NIW and JTL conceived the study. NIW collected and analyzed the data. NIW and JTL wrote the manuscript.
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Communicated by Jamie M. Kneitel.
In dendritic ecological networks, such as streams, branching patterns and directional flow can alter the balance between local and regional processes underlying community assembly. Streams also contain vertical habitat structure, encompassing planktonic and benthic habitats that impose contrasting sets of environmental filters and differ in spatial connectivity within the metacommunity. In this study, we demonstrated that the relative importance of community assembly processes in a stream bacterial metacommunity was not only spatially variable across the network, but also dependent on spatial scale. Furthermore, the strength and pattern of scale-dependence differed within and between vertical habitats in the watershed, suggesting the metacommunity resembles a multi-layer dendritic network.
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Wisnoski, N.I., Lennon, J.T. Microbial community assembly in a multi-layer dendritic metacommunity . Oecologia 195, 13–24 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04767-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04767-w