title: The power of species sorting: local factors drive bacterial community composition over a wide range of spatial scales.
abstract: There is a vivid debate on the relative importance of local and regional factors in shaping microbial communities, and on whether microbial organisms show a biogeographic signature in their distribution. Taking a metacommunity approach, spatial factors can become important either through dispersal limitation (compare large spatial scales) or mass effects (in case of strongly connected systems). We here analyze two datasets on bacterial communities [characterized by community fingerprinting through denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE)] in meso- to eutrophic shallow lakes to investigate the importance of spatial factors at three contrasting scales. Variation partitioning on datasets of both the bacterial communities of 11 shallow lakes that are part of a strongly interconnected and densely packed pond system <1 km apart, three groups of shallow lakes approximately 100 km apart, as well as these three groups of shallow lakes combined that span a large part of a North-South gradient in Europe (>2,500 km) shows a strong impact of local environmental factors on bacterial community composition, with a marginal impact of spatial distance. Our results indicate that dispersal is not strongly limiting even at large spatial scales, and that mass effects do not have a strong impact on bacterial communities even in physically connected systems. We suggest that the fast population growth rates of bacteria facilitate efficient species sorting along environmental gradients in bacterial communities over a very broad range of dispersal rates.
authors: Section of Protistology and Aquatic Ecology, Department of Biology (WE11), Universiteit Gent, Krijgslaan 281-S8, 9000 Gent, Belgium.
authors: Katleen
authors: K
authors: Van der Gucht
authors: Karl
authors: K
authors: Cottenie
authors: Koenraad
authors: K
authors: Muylaert
authors: Nele
authors: N
authors: Vloemans
authors: Sylvie
authors: S
authors: Cousin
authors: Steven
authors: S
authors: Declerck
authors: Erik
authors: E
authors: Jeppesen
authors: Jose-Maria
authors: JM
authors: Conde-Porcuna
authors: Klaus
authors: K
authors: Schwenk
authors: Gabriel
authors: G
authors: Zwart
authors: Hanne
authors: H
authors: Degans
authors: Wim
authors: W
authors: Vyverman
authors: Luc
authors: L
authors: De Meester
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics / Q000302:isolation & purification; D001530:Belgium; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000032:analysis; D003718:Denmark; D004777:Environment; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D009426:Netherlands; D014871:Water Microbiology
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial