Abstract
Snowfall is a global phenomenon highly integrated with hydrology and ecology. Forays into studying bioaerosols and their dependence on aeolian movement are largely constrained to either precipitation-independent analyses or in silico models. Though snowpack and glacial microbiological studies have been conducted, little is known about the biological component of meteoric snow. Through culture-independent phylogenetic and geochemical analyses, we show that the geographical location at which snow precipitates determines snowfall’s geochemical and microbiological composition. Storm-tracking, furthermore, can be used as a valuable environmental indicator to trace down what factors are influencing bioaerosols. We estimate annual aeolian snowfall deposits of up to ∼10 kg of bacterial/archaeal biomass per hectare along our study area of the eastern Front Range in Colorado. The dominant kinds of microbiota captured in an analysis of seven snow events at two different locations, one urban, one rural, across the winter of 2016/2017 included phyla Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Acidobacteria, though a multitude of different kinds of organisms were found in both. Taxonomically, Bacteroidetes were more abundant in Golden (urban plain) snow while Proteobacteria were more common in Sunshine (rural mountain) samples. Chemically, Golden snowfall was positively correlated with some metals and anions. The work also hints at better informing the “everything is everywhere” hypotheses of the microbial world and that atmospheric transport of microbiota is not only common, but is capable of disseminating vast amounts of microbiota of different physiologies and genetics that then affect ecosystems globally. Snowfall, we conclude, is a significant repository of microbiological material with strong implications for both ecosystem genetic flux and general bio-aerosol theory.
Highlights
Throughout temperate and polar regions of the world, snowfall is ubiquitous
Concerning magnitude, our data show that an average of 0.237 ng of bacterial/archaeal gDNA can be recovered per milliliter of fresh snowfall, which is a value unreported in the literature
Microbiota captured on a filter, does not account for additional biomass that may have lysed during the thawing of our snow samples prior to filtering and/or the organisms, for example, nano-archaeota and bacteria that pass through a 0.45-mm filter
Summary
Throughout temperate and polar regions of the world, snowfall is ubiquitous. along the Front Range of eastern Colorado, the mean annual snowfall from 2010 to 2016 is reported as 248 cm in Boulder, Colorado (NOAA, 2017). Colorado given that it represents 43% of the total precipitation (by liquid water volume) from 2010 to 2016 (NOAA, 2017). Both snow and rain require an initiation surface for atmospheric water to condense into a droplet of water or ice particle, respectively. These are thought to be airborne particles of particulate matter, both organic and inorganic of various colloidal sizes (e.g., 0.5–8 mm) (Twomey & Squires, 1959; Nakaya, 2017). Bioaerosols have been suggested as an understudied component of both atmospheric processes and biogeographical fate (Morris et al, 2011)
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