Riverine plankton community assembly in an urbanizing watershed

Understanding the relative importance of – and the interactions between – ecological mechanisms underlying distribution patterns and successional dynamics of freshwater plankton communities is a central problem that remains unsolved in microbial ecology. We complemented variation partitioning analysis, neutral community model, and quantitative process estimate on molecular and morphological plankton data obtained over a five-year sampling campaign in Houxi River, China. The similarity in both bacterioplankton and phytoplankton across the sites decreased with increasing distance from the upstream to the river mouth and formed clusters that roughly match the urban-induced habitat modification and fragmentation. Thus urbanization, through which construction of dams and human-driven biotic and abiotic inputs take place might have caused habitat fragmentation by forming ecoclines of longitudinally connected ecotones. Functional community structure was slightly different between the reservoir and river sites. These results highlighted that human-induced hydrological change and anthropogenic pollution in the studied river system did not only constrain dispersal but also taxonomic and functional attributes of the riverine plankton communities.

Primary Presenter: Alain Isabwe, University of Michigan (aisabwe@gmail.com)

Authors:

Jun Yang, Aquatic EcoHealth Group, Fujian Key Laboratory of Watershed Ecology  (jyang@iue.ac.cn)

Jun Yang, College of Agriculture, Yangtze University  (jyang@iue.ac.cn)