Stochastic and Deterministic Assembly Processes in Subsurface Microbial Communities

Journal Article · Thu Mar 29 04:00:00 EDT 2012 · The ISME Journal, 6(9):1653-1664

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2012.22· OSTI ID:1057830

Stegen, James C; Lin, Xueju; Konopka, Allan; Fredrickson, Jim K

A major goal of microbial community ecology is to understand the forces that structure community composition. Deterministic selection by specific environmental factors is sometimes important, but in other cases stochastic or ecologically neutral processes dominate. Lacking is a unified conceptual framework aiming to understand why deterministic processes dominate in some contexts but not others. Here we work towards such a framework. By testing predictions derived from general ecological theory we aim to uncover factors that govern the relative influences of deterministic and stochastic processes. We couple spatiotemporal data on subsurface microbial communities and environmental parameters with metrics and null models of within and between community phylogenetic composition. Testing for phylogenetic signal in organismal niches showed that more closely related taxa have more similar habitat associations. Community phylogenetic analyses further showed that ecologically similar taxa coexist to a greater degree than expected by chance. Environmental filtering thus deterministically governs subsurface microbial community composition. More importantly, the influence of deterministic environmental filtering relative to stochastic factors was maximized at both ends of an environmental variation gradient. A stronger role of stochastic factors was, however, supported through analyses of phylogenetic temporal turnover. While phylogenetic turnover was on average faster than expected, most pairwise comparisons were not themselves significantly non-random. The relative influence of deterministic environmental filtering over community dynamics was elevated, however, in the most temporally and spatially variable environments. Our results point to general rules governing the relative influences of stochastic and deterministic processes across micro- and macro-organisms.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1057830
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-84131
• Journal Information: The ISME Journal, 6(9):1653-1664, Journal Name: The ISME Journal, 6(9):1653-1664
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

community assembly
distance decay
evolutionary niche conservatism
neutral theory
niche theory
phylogenetic beta diversity