The Transition From Stochastic to Deterministic Bacterial Community Assembly During Permafrost Thaw Succession

The Northern high latitudes are warming twice as fast as the global average, and permafrost has become vulnerable to thaw. Changes to the environment during thaw leads to shifts in microbial communities and their associated functions, such as greenhouse gas emissions. Understanding the ecological pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in microbiology Vol. 11; p. 596589
Main Authors: Doherty, Stacey Jarvis, Barbato, Robyn A., Grandy, A. Stuart, Thomas, W. Kelley, Monteux, Sylvain, Dorrepaal, Ellen, Johansson, Margareta, Ernakovich, Jessica G.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 13.11.2020
Subjects:
Annan geovetenskap (Här ingår: Geografisk informationsvetenskap)
Biologi
Biological Sciences
community assembly
Earth and Related Environmental Sciences
ecological processes
Ecology
Ecology (including Biodiversity Conservation)
Ekologi
Geovetenskap och relaterad miljövetenskap
microbial community
Microbiology
Mikrobiologi
Natural Sciences
Naturvetenskap
Other Earth Sciences (including Geographical Information Science)
permafrost thaw
phylogenetic null modeling
microbial community
phylogenetic null modeling
permafrost thaw
community assembly
ecological processes
ISSN:1664-302X, 1664-302X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The Northern high latitudes are warming twice as fast as the global average, and permafrost has become vulnerable to thaw. Changes to the environment during thaw leads to shifts in microbial communities and their associated functions, such as greenhouse gas emissions. Understanding the ecological processes that structure the identity and abundance (i.e., assembly) of pre- and post-thaw communities may improve predictions of the functional outcomes of permafrost thaw. We characterized microbial community assembly during permafrost thaw using observations and a laboratory incubation of soils from the Storflaket Mire in Abisko, Sweden, where permafrost thaw has occurred over the past decade. observations indicated that bacterial community assembly was driven by randomness (i.e., stochastic processes) immediately after thaw with drift and dispersal limitation being the dominant processes. As post-thaw succession progressed, environmentally driven (i.e., deterministic) processes became increasingly important in structuring microbial communities where homogenizing selection was the only process structuring upper active layer soils. Furthermore, laboratory-induced thaw reflected assembly dynamics immediately after thaw indicated by an increase in drift, but did not capture the long-term effects of permafrost thaw on microbial community dynamics. Our results did not reflect a link between assembly dynamics and carbon emissions, likely because respiration is the product of many processes in microbial communities. Identification of dominant microbial community assembly processes has the potential to improve our understanding of the ecological impact of permafrost thaw and the permafrost-climate feedback.
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Edited by: Laura Zucconi, University of Tuscia, Italy
Reviewed by: Eric M. Bottos, Thompson Rivers University, Canada; Jackson Sorensen, University of California, Davis, United States
This article was submitted to Extreme Microbiology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Microbiology
ISSN:1664-302X
1664-302X
DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2020.596589