Investigation of ecological processes shaping microbial metacommunity structure across distinct aquifers

In this project we analyzed microbial community composition based on 16S rRNA amplicon data that were collected from four distinct aquifers located in different regions along a latitudinal transect of ~700 km across Germany. The aim of the project was to establish the contributions of different ecological processes to variation in microbial community composition, i.e. species sorting imposed by contemporary environmental conditions and broad-scale region-specific factors (e.g. climate, geology or historical events) and stochastic processes related to dispersal, dispersal limitation, and drift within as well as across regions.