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Contributed Talk

Session: : Ecosystem Stability And Resilience 3

COS 217-2 - Spatial and environmental dimensions of microbiome stability across a Hawaiian watershed

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
3:45 PM – 4:00 PM PDT
Location: D139
Abstract: Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi are essential to the healthy functioning of ecosystems, contributing to processes regulating macroorganism health and biogeochemical cycling that collectively enable the maintenance of life. Despite their importance, we know very little about whether microbiome stability is maintained across different ecosystem compartments such as members of different trophic guilds, and how changes in environmental conditions affect the stability of microbiomes. Here, we compare microbial (fungal and bacterial) co-occurrence networks across an entire Hawaiian watershed, in which continental-scale variation in habitat, temperature and rainfall is represented in a contiguous and relatively small footprint (< 12 km from ridge to fringe coral reef). We characterized bacterial, fungal, and cross-domain bacterial-fungal co-occurrence networks from stream, marine and terrestrial habitats inclusive of a wide range of microbiome hosts and substrates inhabited by microbes. We assessed network architecture to detect how microbial interactions at the landscape scale assort, and whether patterns differed for single, versus cross-domain networks. Additionally, we compared terrestrial networks along our steep environmental gradient to evaluate changes in network stability and compared single- with cross-domain networks to examine the role of fungi in stabilizing network architecture. We also identified specific network properties associated with edaphic factors such as soil organic carbon content.

We found that cross-domain networks differed in robustness relative to fungal networks. Terrestrial networks varied in stability along the watershed from the relatively undisturbed headwaters to sites lower down with relatively higher levels of human activity. We also identified specific and highly connected taxa correlated with edaphic conditions. This work provides a framework for follow-up experiments that explicitly test the roles of specific taxa and interactions among microbial consortia that we found to be associated with network stability or environmental properties. Determining the network properties of microbiomes is a first step to understanding how interactions among microbial community members may affect important aspects of ecosystem function such as carbon cycling and primary productivity and how these communities will respond to pressures that environments will increasingly face in the Anthropocene.