Soil bacteria and fungi on tropical mountainsides: Joint effects of weathering, climate, and chemical factors.

Contemporary environmental factors such as temperature and pH are generally identified as primary influences on microbial diversity, while the role of geological processes remain understudied. Here, we investigated the diversity and community composition of bacteria and fungi along an elevational gradient from703 to 4514 m on Mt. Kilimanjaro, East Africa.

Carbon and Nutrient Limitations of Microbial Metabolism in Xingkai Lake, China: Abiotic and Biotic Drivers.

Microbial communities are crucial for water quality and biogeochemical cycling in freshwaters. Microbes secrete extracellular enzymes to decompose organic matter for their needs of nutrients and scarce elements. Yet, there is a lack of knowledge on microbial metabolic limitations in freshwaters, especially in lake sediments.

Extracellular enzyme stoichiometry reveals carbon and nitrogen limitations closely linked to bacterial communities in China's largest saline lake.

Saline lakes possess substantial carbon storage and play essential roles in global carbon cycling. Benthic microorganisms mine and decompose sediment organic matter via extracellular enzymes to acquire limiting nutrients and thus meet their element budgets, which ultimately causes variations in sediment carbon storage. However, current knowledge about microbial nutrient limitation and the associated organic carbon changes especially in saline lake remains elusive.

Eutrophication decrease compositional dissimilarity in freshwater plankton communities.

Human activities, such as land use change and eutrophication, threaten freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem function. In this study, we examined both the α- and β-diversity of plankton communities, that is, bacteria/prokaryotic algae, eukaryotic algae, and zooplankton/metazoans, using both classical microscopy and high-throughput sequencing methods across 40 lakes of the Yangtze River Basin. The spatial variations in plankton communities were explained by environmental variables such as trophic status index (TSI) and environmental heterogeneity according to non-metric multidimensional scaling analyses, mantel tests, and structural equation model.

Eutrophication causes microbial community homogenization via modulating generalist species.

Eutrophication substantially influences the community structure of aquatic organisms and has become a major threat to biodiversity. However, whether eutrophication is linked to homogenization of microbial communities and the possible underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we studied bacterial and fungal communities from water and sediments of 40 shallow lakes in the Yangtze-Huaihe River basin, a representative area characterized by intensifying eutrophication in China, and further examined the beta diversity patterns and underlying mechanisms under eutrophication conditions.