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Drivers of bacterial beta-diversity depend on spatial scale.

ABSTRACT: The factors driving ?-diversity (variation in community composition) yield insights into the maintenance of biodiversity on the planet. Here we tested whether the mechanisms that underlie bacterial ?-diversity vary over centimeters to continental spatial scales by comparing the composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria communities in salt marsh sediments. As observed in studies of macroorganisms, the drivers of salt marsh bacterial ?-diversity depend on spatial scale. In contrast to macroorganism studies, however, we found no evidence of evolutionary diversification of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria taxa at the continental scale, despite an overall relationship between geographic distance and community similarity. Our data are consistent with the idea that dispersal limitation at local scales can contribute to ?-diversity, even though the 16S rRNA genes of the relatively common taxa are globally distributed. These results highlight the importance of considering multiple spatial scales for understanding microbial biogeography.

SUBMITTER: Martiny JB

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3093525 | biostudies-literature | 2011 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Drivers of bacterial beta-diversity depend on spatial scale.

Martiny Jennifer B H JB Eisen Jonathan A JA Penn Kevin K Allison Steven D SD Horner-Devine M Claire MC

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20110425 19

The factors driving β-diversity (variation in community composition) yield insights into the maintenance of biodiversity on the planet. Here we tested whether the mechanisms that underlie bacterial β-diversity vary over centimeters to continental spatial scales by comparing the composition of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria communities in salt marsh sediments. As observed in studies of macroorganisms, the drivers of salt marsh bacterial β-diversity depend on spatial scale. In contrast to macroorganis ...[more]

PMID: 21518859

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Project description:The outcome of species interactions may manifest differently at different spatial scales; therefore, our interpretation of observed interactions will depend on the scale at which observations are made. For example, in ladybeetle-aphid systems, the results from small-scale cage experiments usually cannot be extrapolated to landscape-scale field observations. To understand how ladybeetle-aphid interactions change across spatial scales, we evaluated predator-prey interactions in an experimental system. The experimental habitat consisted of 81 potted plants and was manipulated to facilitate analysis across four spatial scales. We also simulated a spatially explicit metacommunity model parallel to the experiment. In the experiment, we found that the negative effect of ladybeetles on aphids decreased with increasing spatial scales. This pattern can be explained by ladybeetles strongly suppressing aphids at small scales, but not colonizing distant patches fast enough to suppress aphids at larger scales. In the experiment, the positive effects of aphids on ladybeetles were strongest at three-plant scale. In a model scenario where predators did not have demographic dynamics, we found, consistent with the experiment, that both the effects of ladybeetles on aphids and the effects of aphids on ladybeetles decreased with increasing spatial scales. These patterns suggest that dispersal was the primary cause of ladybeetle population dynamics in our experiment: aphids increased ladybeetle numbers at smaller scales because ladybeetles stayed in a patch longer and performed area-restricted searches after encountering aphids; these behaviors did not affect ladybeetle numbers at larger spatial scales. The parallel experimental and model results illustrate how predator-prey interactions can change across spatial scales, suggesting that our interpretation of observed predator-prey dynamics would differ if observations were made at different scales. This study demonstrates how studying ecological interactions at a range of scales can help link the results of small-scale ecological experiments to landscape-scale ecological problems.

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Drivers of bacterial beta-diversity depend on spatial scale.

Publications

Drivers of bacterial beta-diversity depend on spatial scale.

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