Salinity negatively impacts protistan and fungal community stability and shapes assembly processes in freshwater ecosystems

In freshwater lakes, protistan and fungal communities play crucial roles in the microbial loop as bacterivorous consumers, facilitating nutrient cycling and maintaining microbial balance bycontrolling bacterial populations. However, understanding of their functional roles and community assembly across varying environmental gradients in different lake ecosystems remain limited. In this study, we used ITS and 18S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and multivariate statistical analyses to investigate the spatiotemporal and biogeographical patterns of protistan and fungal communities in water column of two different lake systems in Croatia. Sequencing was performed at the Joint Microbiome Facility of the Medical University of Vienna and the University of Vienna under the project ID JMF-2112-10, JMF-2301-04 and JMF-2304-04.