Microbial communities of mountain lake sediments in Wyoming, USA
We assessed prokaryotic communities in surficial lake sediments from 48 sediment cores from 36 lakes in the Beartooth, Bighorn, Snowy, and Wind River mountain ranges in Wyoming, USA. We assessed how microbial communities in vary with sediment depth from top sediments rich in nutrients to extreme energy-limited environments in deeper sediment layers. We analyzed compositional changes of microbes along this vertical depth profile, and assessed how this profile varied across lakes in distant mountain ranges (up to 500 km apart), to determine the relative influence of environmental and geographic drivers.