Exploring freshwater stream bacterial communities as indicators of land use intensity.

Background: Stream ecosystems comprise complex interactions among biological communities and their physicochemical surroundings, contributing to their overall ecological health. Despite this, many monitoring programs ignore changes in the bacterial communities that are the base of food webs in streams, often focusing on stream physicochemical assessments or macroinvertebrate community diversity instead. We used 16S rRNA gene sequencing to assess bacterial community compositions within 600 New Zealand stream biofilm samples from 204 sites within a 6-week period (February-March 2010).

A predictive model of recreational water quality based on adaptive synthetic sampling algorithms and machine learning.

Predicting recreational water quality is one of the most difficult tasks in water management with major implications for humans and society. Many data-driven models have been used to predict water quality indicators to allow a real time assessment of public health risk. This assessment is most commonly based on Faecal Indicator Bacteria (FIB), with the value of FIB compared with thresholds published in guidelines.

Following Rapoport's Rule: the geographic range and genome size of bacterial taxa decline at warmer latitudes.

We sought to test whether stream bacterial communities conform to Rapoport's Rule, a pattern commonly observed for plants and animals whereby taxa exhibit decreased latitudinal range sizes closer to the equator. Using a DNA sequencing approach, we explored the biogeography of biofilm bacterial communities in 204 streams across a ∼1000 km latitudinal gradient. The range sizes of bacterial taxa were strongly correlated with latitude, decreasing closer to the equator, which coincided with a greater than fivefold increase in bacterial taxonomic richness.

Using biofilm as a novel approach to assess stormwater treatment efficacy.

Contaminants associated with stormwater are among the leading causes of water quality impairment in urban streams. Multiple device treatment systems are commonly installed with the aim of reducing contaminant loads within stormwater discharge. However, the in situ performance of such systems remains poorly understood.