Bacterioplankton composition as an indicator of environmental status: proof of principle using indicator value analysis of estuarine communities

作者：Cecília Alonso, Emiliano Pereira-Flores, Florencia Bertoglio, Miquel De Cáceres, Rudolf Amann · 发表于：Aquatic Microbial Ecology · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.3354/ame01979 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology、Marine and coastal ecosystems、Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies

Increasing awareness of environmental impacts caused by anthropogenic activities highlights the need to determine indicators of environmental status that can be routinely assessed at large spatial and temporal scales. Microbial communities comprise the greatest share of biological diversity on Earth and can rapidly reflect recent environmental changes while providing a record of past events. However, they have rarely been targeted in the search for ecological indicators of habitat types, environmental conditions, or environmental changes. Here, as a proof of principle, we analysed the bacterioplankton community composition of 4 estuaries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia, and looked for indicators of groups of samples defined using partition techniques, according to primary physicochemical variables typically monitored to infer water quality. Indicator value analysis ( IndVal ) was conducted to identify indicator operational taxonomic units (OTUs; analogous to species in other fields of ecology) in each group. These bacterioplankton-based indicators exhibited a high capacity to predict the group membership of the samples within each estuary and to correctly assign the samples to the appropriate estuary in a combined data set, employing different machine learning techniques. The indicators were composed of OTUs belonging to several bacterial phyla, which responded significantly and differentially to the environmental variables used to define the groups of samples. M...