Abstract
Microorganisms attached to aerosols can travel intercontinental distances, survive, and further colonize remote environments. Airborne microbes are influenced by environmental and climatic patterns that are predicted to change in the near future, with unknown consequences. We developed a new predictive method that dynamically addressed the temporal evolution of biodiversity in response to environmental covariates, linked to future climatic scenarios of the IPCC (AR5). We fitted these models against a 7-year monitoring of airborne microbes, collected in wet depositions. We found that Bacteria were more influenced by climatic variables than by aerosols sources, while the opposite was detected for Eukarya. Also, model simulations showed a general decline in bacterial richness, idiosyncratic responses of Eukarya, and changes in seasonality, with higher intensity within the worst-case climatic scenario (RCP 8.5). Additionally, the model predicted lower richness for airborne potential eukaryotic (fungi) pathogens of plants and humans. Our work pioneers on the potential effects of environmental variability on the airborne microbiome under the uncertain context of climate change.
Highlights
Microorganisms attached to aerosols can travel intercontinental distances, survive, and further colonize remote environments
The temporal dynamics of bacteria were strongly related to climatic factors such as temperature, irradiance, and humidity (Fig. 1)
The origin of aerosols according to the chemical composition of depositions shaped the dynamics of the most abundant and richest eukarya (Fig. 1); acid-neutralizing capacity (ANC), conductivity, C a2+, and Cl− strongly influenced the colonization of fungi Basidiomycota and Ascomycota
Summary
Microorganisms attached to aerosols can travel intercontinental distances, survive, and further colonize remote environments. We developed a new predictive method that dynamically addressed the temporal evolution of biodiversity in response to environmental covariates, linked to future climatic scenarios of the IPCC (AR5). We fitted these models against a 7-year monitoring of airborne microbes, collected in wet depositions. Recent studies have shown that meteorological factors and seasonality influence the composition of airborne bacterial communities[14,15,16] This evidence suggests that climatic conditions may act as an environmental filter for the aeroplankton, selecting a subset of species from the regional pool, and raises the question of the relative importance of the different factors affecting both bacterial and eukaryal aeroplankton. The dataset is unique to explore the temporal dynamics of the long-range dispersal of airborne bacteria, fungi, and protists (i.e., aeroplankton)
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