Influence of flooding duration on eukaryotic soil and water communities. AquaFlow_CampB

Within the first AquaFlow project (Graupner et al. 2017) we tested the influence of short-term flooding events on the community composition of soil and water microbial eukaryotes using an NGS approach. The second project was conducted to analyse the influence of flooding duration on the respective communities. Therefore we designed an experiment with 2h up to 8d flooding time. For each of the six AquaFlow mesocosms we applied an individual flooding duration and one non-flooded control. Soil and water samples were collected regularly and used for an amplicon library preparation using the primer combination published in Röhl et al. (2017). Subsequent to the flooding phase we observed the communities for another four weeks, to determine flooding duration dependent community development. Descriptive statistical analyses revealed almost no sustainable influence of flooding on the soil communities. Soil communities respond shortly to changed abiotic properties (moisture, availability of oxygen and redox potential) but showed afterwards a recovery to their pre-flooding condition.While water communities responded very slowly to applied flooding. It was possible to detect a flooding duration dependent community split four weeks after the flooding. Further, the total species richness decreases strongly within the system. Water organisms are not able to deal with changed conditions inside the mesocosms.