Habitat species pools shape algal and bacterial communities and their correlations.

Abstract

Understanding of community ecology is scale dependent. When the scale definition changes from subjectively defined "regional species pools" to "habitat species pools", heterogeneity differences occur for microbial communities. However, given the environmental gradients differences among habitats, responses of other organisms and interspecific correlations to habitat species pools may also be heterogeneous. This hypothesis is supported by our research about algal and bacterial communities among four different habitats in littoral zones. In our results, both the algal and bacterial community compositions varied along habitat species pools. Furthermore, at community level, significant correlation was only found between bacterioplankton and phytoplankton in pelagic habitat. And at individual level, the covariant trends between habitat generalists in algal and bacterial communities varied among habitats. Our results indicated that habitat-specific patterns can not only influence the habitat species pools, but also shape the interspecies interaction, and this should be considered in the further study of algae-bacterial correlation.