Abstract
Succession is defined as changes in biological communities over time. It has been extensively studied in plant communities, but little is known about bacterial succession, in particular in environments such as High Arctic glacier forelands. Bacteria carry out key processes in the development of soil, biogeochemical cycling and facilitating plant colonization. In this study we sampled two roughly parallel chronosequences in the foreland of Midre Lovén glacier on Svalbard, Norway and tested whether any of several factors were associated with changes in the structure of bacterial communities, including time after glacier retreat, horizontal variation caused by the distance between chronosequences and vertical variation at two soil depths. The structures of soil bacterial communities at different locations were compared using terminal restriction fragment length polymorphisms of 16S rRNA genes, and the data were analyzed by sequential analysis of log-linear statistical models. Although no significant differences in community structure were detected between the two chronosequences, statistically significant differences between sampling locations in the surface and mineral soils could be demonstrated even though glacier forelands are patchy and dynamic environments. These findings suggest that bacterial succession occurs in High Arctic glacier forelands but may differ in different soil depths.
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Acknowledgements
The fieldwork was funded by the Amundsen Center at the University of Tromsø and the Norwegian Polar Institute. The DNA Sequence Analysis Core Facility at the University of Idaho is supported by an NIH Center of Biomedical Research Excellence grant (P20 RR016448) from the National Center for Research Resources to LJF. We thank Dr Rolf A Olsen and the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) for facilitating our field research, and Dr Ian Hodkinson and Dr Steve Coulson for information on their sampling locations and valuable discussions. We also wish to acknowledge Dr Eva Top for advice on methods for DNA isolation, Richard Pendegraft for help with statistical analyses, and Dr Matthias Zielke, Dr Stefano Ventura and Silvia Turichia for their assistance in the field. Finally, we appreciate the helpful comments on the article provided by Dr Kari Segraves and Dr Patrick Kuss.
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Schütte, U., Abdo, Z., Bent, S. et al. Bacterial succession in a glacier foreland of the High Arctic. ISME J 3, 1258–1268 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2009.71
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2009.71
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