Geography and habitat have comparable influences on bacterial community turnover across a tropical coastal ecosystem
This project investigates the relative influence of habitat and geography on bacterial community structure across tropical coastal ecosystems in Peninsular Malaysia. Five-liter seawater samples were collected within coral reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows on the east and west coasts of the Malay Peninsula and filtered for microbial DNA. Bacterial communities were characterized using PacBio HiFi full-length 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The study examines bacterial alpha and beta diversity, habitat- and coast-associated taxa, spatial distance-decay relationships, marine connectivity, and associations between microbial community composition and broad-scale environmental gradients. These data provide a regional assessment of seawater bacterial biogeography across interconnected tropical marine habitats and support evaluation of the relative contributions of local habitat and regional geographic structure to microbial community turnover.