title: Contrasting seasonal niche separation between rare and abundant taxa conceals the extent of protist diversity.
abstract: With the advent of molecular methods, it became clear that microbial biodiversity had been vastly underestimated. Since then, species abundance patterns were determined for several environments, but temporal changes in species composition were not studied to the same level of resolution. Using massively parallel sequencing on the 454 GS FLX platform we identified a highly dynamic turnover of the seasonal abundance of protists in the Austrian lake Fuschlsee. We show that seasonal abundance patterns of protists closely match their biogeographic distribution. The stable predominance of few highly abundant taxa, which previously led to the suggestion of a low global protist species richness, is contrasted by a highly dynamic turnover of rare species. We suggest that differential seasonality of rare and abundant protist taxa explains the--so far--conflicting evidence in the 'everything is everywhere' dispute. Consequently temporal sampling is basic for adequate diversity and species richness estimates.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Populationsgenetik, Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien, Veterinärplatz 1, A-1210 Vienna, Austria.
authors.forename: Viola
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Nolte
authors.forename: Ram Vinay
authors.initials: RV
authors.lastname: Pandey
authors.forename: Steffen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jost
authors.forename: Ralph
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Medinger
authors.forename: Birgit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ottenwälder
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Boenigk
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Schlötterer
mesh_terms: D001317:Austria; D044822:Biodiversity; D019295:Computational Biology; D017753:Ecosystem; D056890:Eukaryota / Q000235:genetics*; D005618:Fresh Water; D012621:Seasons; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA