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Factors influencing aquatic and terrestrial bacterial community assembly
Author(s) -
Langenheder Silke,
Lindström Eva S.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
environmental microbiology reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.229
H-Index - 69
ISSN - 1758-2229
DOI - 10.1111/1758-2229.12731
Subject(s) - biological dispersal , trophic level , ecology , context (archaeology) , biology , ecosystem , habitat , community , temporal scales , spatial contextual awareness , spatial ecology , geography , environmental resource management , environmental science , population , paleontology , demography , remote sensing , sociology
Summary During recent years, many studies have shown that different processes including drift, environmental selection and dispersal can be important for the assembly of bacterial communities in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. However, we lack a conceptual overview about the ecological context and factors that influence the relative importance of the different assembly mechanisms and determine their dynamics in time and space. Focusing on free‐living, i.e., nonhost associated, bacterial communities, this minireview, therefore, summarizes and conceptualizes findings from empirical studies about how (i) environmental factors, such as environmental heterogeneity, disturbances, productivity and trophic interactions; (ii) connectivity and dispersal rates (iii) spatial scale, (iv) community properties and traits and (v) the use of taxonomic/phylogenetic or functional metrics influence the relative importance of different community assembly processes. We find that there is to‐date little consistency among studies and suggest that future studies should now address how (i)–(v) differ between habitats and organisms and how this, in turn, influences the temporal and spatial‐scale dependency of community assembly processes in microorganisms.