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Summary: Resistance, resilience, and redundancy
in microbial communities
Steven D. Allison
and Jennifer B. H. Martiny§
Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697
Although it is generally accepted that plant community composi-
tion is key for predicting rates of ecosystem processes in the face
of global change, microbial community composition is often ig-
nored in ecosystem modeling. To address this issue, we review
recent experiments and assess whether microbial community com-
position is resistant, resilient, or functionally redundant in re-
sponse to four different disturbances. We find that the composi-
tion of most microbial groups is sensitive and not immediately
resilient to disturbance, regardless of taxonomic breadth of the
group or the type of disturbance. Other studies demonstrate that
changes in composition are often associated with changes in
ecosystem process rates. Thus, changes in microbial communities
due to disturbance may directly affect ecosystem processes. Based
on these relationships, we propose a simple framework to incor-
porate microbial community composition into ecosystem process
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