Abstract
BackgroundBacterial communities are essential to the biogeochemical cycle in riverine ecosystems. However, little is presently known about the integrated biogeography of planktonic and sedimentary bacterial communities in large rivers.ResultsThis study provides the first spatiotemporal pattern of bacterial communities in the Yangtze River, the largest river in Asia with a catchment area of 1,800,000 km2. We find that sedimentary bacteria made larger contributions than planktonic bacteria to the bacterial diversity of the Yangzte River ecosystem with the sediment subgroup providing 98.8% of 38,906 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) observed in 280 samples of synchronous flowing water and sediment at 50 national monitoring stations covering a 4300 km reach. OTUs within the same phylum displayed uniform seasonal variations, and many phyla demonstrated autumn preference throughout the length of the river. Seasonal differences in bacterial communities were statistically significant in water, whereas bacterial communities in both water and sediment were geographically clustered according to five types of landforms: mountain, foothill, basin, foothill-mountain, and plain. Interestingly, the presence of two huge dams resulted in a drastic fall of bacterial taxa in sediment immediately downstream due to severe riverbed scouring. The integrity of the biogeography is satisfactorily interpreted by the combination of neutral and species sorting perspectives in meta-community theory for bacterial communities in flowing water and sediment.ConclusionsOur study fills a gap in understanding of bacterial communities in one of the world’s largest river and highlights the importance of both planktonic and sedimentary communities to the integrity of bacterial biogeographic patterns in a river subject to varying natural and anthropogenic impacts.
Highlights
Bacterial communities are essential to the biogeochemical cycle in riverine ecosystems
The rarefaction curves illustrated that the bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) obtained by the current sequencing depth were sufficient to represent the microbial communities in water samples; whereas the curves of most of the sediment samples did not reach a plateau (Additional file 2: Figure S2)
The results indicate that bacterial communities in both water and sediment samples were enriched during the autumn; the autumn-associated OTUs accounted for 30.5% (648) and 47.8% (269) of the sediment and water samples, which is higher than the 12.6% (267) and 26.1%
Summary
Bacterial communities are essential to the biogeochemical cycle in riverine ecosystems. Little is presently known about the integrated biogeography of planktonic and sedimentary bacterial communities in large rivers. Rivers play an important part in coupling biogeochemical cycles between continents and oceans [1]. The resulting planktonic bacterial community is vulnerable to changes in its composition and structure. The spatiotemporal distribution of planktonic and sedimentary bacterial communities in rivers could be quite different. Bacterial diversity is significantly altered by varying fluvial landforms and severe human interference along a large river. A better understanding of bacterial responses to the changing environment of river ecosystems is useful in the context of riverine cycles of nutrients, e.g., carbon and nitrogen, which are highly relevant to emission or sequestration of greenhouse gases [12,13,14]
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