Original title: A quantitative framework reveals ecological drivers of grassland microbial community assembly in response to warming
Microbial communities can take shape through environmental selection, movement between places, the creation of new types, or random changes. The researchers built iCAMP, a method that groups microbes by evolutionary relatedness and compares the groups with a null modelA prediction of what patterns might occur by chance, used for comparison., a prediction of what could happen by chance. In grasslands exposed to experimental warming, they found strong environmental selection and random change. Over time, warming reduced random change and strengthened selection, especially among Bacillales microbes.
Imagine making the same meal in two kitchens with different ingredients on hand. The meals may differ because the kitchens favor different choices, or because small choices happen by chance. In this paper, the kitchens stand for grassland conditions, the meal choices for which microbes are present, and the comparison with chance helps separate environmental influence from random change.
Grassland microbes help form the communities living in warming ecosystems, but it is hard to tell what shapes those communities. This framework separates the influence of environmental selection from random change, helping ecologists track how warming and conditions such as drought relate to microbial assembly.
The abstract reports tests on simulated communities and an application to grassland microbes under experimental warming. It does not establish how well iCAMP works across other real-world ecosystems, or show that the reported links between selection, drought, and plant productivity are causal.
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A quantitative framework reveals ecological drivers of grassland microbial community assembly in response to warming — Daliang Ning, Mengting Yuan, Linwei Wu et al. — Nature Communications — doi:10.1038/s41467-020-18560-z
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.