Sydney Harbour microbial diversity study

Sydney Harbour is an economically and environmentally important estuary with a variety of differing land uses on its foreshores. The communities of microbial plankton in Sydney Harbour are little known. The aim of this project was to assess the diversity and flux in communities of planktonic microbes, phytoplankton and protists at selected sites in Sydney Harbour over a 12 period. Winter and Spring are normally considered to be times of change in phytoplankton communities, as populations may expand rapidly due to temperature or nutrient cues, or they may contract. In addition, rainfall and its associated runoff into estuaries can lead to large shifts in microbial community structure. Using this baseline data, we aimed to identify the environmental drivers of temporal shifts, and determine associations between bacterioplankton and eukaryotic microbes, including phytoplankton. We aimed to determine the target species, with an impact on public health, for on-going monitoring using molecular genetic methods, and determine the efficacy of the molecular tools we used for understanding the estuarine microbial community.