Study of bacterioplankton and biofilm on freshwater shallow ponds. pond metagenome

In this work we explicitly compare the relative importance of ecological processes in structuring bacterioplankton and biofilm communities of freshwater ponds to assess whether both community types are governed by a same hierarchy of processes. Additionally, we incorporate small-scale and large-scale variation (within and among ponds) and compare communities from different aquatic microhabitats (open water, Nuphar, Phragmites sites) within and among ponds. The combination of comparing different community types from different microhabitat types at different spatial scales makes our study unique. The results show that both biofilm and plankton communities are highly structured by species sorting, with among-lake variation being more important than within-lake variation, with no signals of dispersal limitation and mass effects.