Bacterioplankton community responses to key environmental variables in plateau freshwater lake ecosystems: A structural equation modeling and change point analysis

Abstract

Elevated environmental pressures negatively affect the bacterial community structure. However, little knowledge about the nonlinear responses of spatially related environmental variable across multiple plateau lake ecosystems on bacterioplankton communities has been gathered. Here, we used 454 pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes to study the associations of bacterial communities in terms of environmental characteristics as well as the potentially ecological threshold-inducing shifts of the bacterial community structure along the key environmental variables based on hypothesized structural equation models and the SEGMENTED method in 21 plateau lakes. Our results showed that water transparency was the major driving force and that total nitrogen was more significant than total phosphorus in determining the taxon composition of the bacterioplankton community. Significant community threshold estimates for bacterioplankton were observed at 7.36 for pH and 25.6% for the percentage of the agricultural area, while the remarkable change point of the cyanobacteria community structure responding to pH was at 7.74. Furthermore, the findings indicated that increasing nutrient loads can induce a distinct shift in dominance from Proteobacteria to Cyanobacteria, as well as a sharp decrease and adjacent increase when crossing the change point for Actinobacteria and Bacteroidetes along the gradient of the agricultural area.

Keywords: Bacterioplankton; Change point; Cyanobacteria; Plateau lakes; Segmented; Structural equation model.