High-frequency sampling of winter and summer microbial communities winter 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.