High-frequency sampling of winter and summer microbial communities summer 18S RNA
This study concentrates on short-term sampling of the pelagic ecosystem. Small scales, those that capture local and growth patterns, will more likely reflect differences in the way communities are organized. The short-term sampling that we performed corresponds to sub-daily sampling of a well-studied coastal ecosystem (the Blanes Bay Microbial Observatory), where we have been working for the last 15 years. In previous studies there has been ample evidence of the seasonal patterns in the diversity of prokaryotes and small-sized protists, yet this seasonality has been described at sampling scales ranging from weeks to months. Daily samplings allowed us to get a better understanding of microbial communities dynamics not captured by longer temporal scales.