Abstract
Many eukaryotic communities exhibit predictable seasonality in species composition, but such phenological patterns are not well-documented in bacterial communities. This study quantified seasonal variation in the community composition of bacterioplankton in a high-elevation lake in the Sierra Nevada of California over a 3-year period of 2004–2006. Bacterioplankton exhibited consistent phenological patterns, with distinct, interannually recurring community types characteristic of the spring snowmelt, ice-off and fall-overturn periods in the lake. Thermal stratification was associated with the emergence of specific communities each summer and increased community heterogeneity throughout the water column. Two key environmental variables modulated by regional meteorologic variation, lake residence time and thermal stability, predicted the timing of occurrence of community types each year with 75% accuracy, and each corresponded with different aspects of variation in community composition (orthogonal ordination axes). Seasonal variation in dissolved organic matter source was characterized fluorometrically in 2005 and was highly correlated with overall variation in bacterial community structure (rMantel=0.75, P<0.001) and with the relative contributions of specific phylotypes within the Cyanobacteria, Actinobacteria and β-Proteobacteria. The seasonal dynamics of bacterial clades (tracked through coupling of randomized clone sequence libraries to restriction fragment length polymorphism fingerprints) matched previous results from alpine lakes and were variously related to solute inputs, thermal stability and temperature. Taken together, these results describe a phenology of high-elevation bacterioplankton communities linked to climate-driven physical and chemical lake characteristics already known to regulate eukaryotic plankton community structure.
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Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge Kevin Skeen for field assistance, J Jones for assistance with chlorophyll analysis, F Setaro for assistance with organic nutrient digestions, and B Clinton, A Engen and B Petty for conducting flow-injection and combustion elemental analysis. I am particularly indebted to JO Sickman and MA Anderson for their analysis of dissolved organic matter fluorescence. The comments of SD Cooper, CA Carlson and JM Melack greatly improved this paper. This study relied on the administrative support of Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park and the UCSB Marine Science Institute. Financial support was provided by the University of California Water Resources Center Grant W988 to JM Melack and CA Carlson, NSF DDIG grant 0709975 to CE Nelson, and NSF grants 0089839 and 0614207 to JM Melack, JS Schimel and JO Sickman.
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Nelson, C. Phenology of high-elevation pelagic bacteria: the roles of meteorologic variability, catchment inputs and thermal stratification in structuring communities. ISME J 3, 13–30 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2008.81
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