Distinct strategies of abundant and rare bacterioplankton in river-reservoir system: Evidence from a 2800 km plateau river

Abstract

Riverine bacterioplankton are highly responsive to river alterations and their abundant and rare sub-communities may have different roles in biogeochemical cycling. However, with the rapid development of dam constructions, our knowledge on adaptation mechanism of these sub-communities in regulated river ecosystem was still limited, especially with regard to their functional traits. Here, our study was conducted in the 2800 km Yarlung Tsangpo River on the Tibetan Plateau to address the question of how abundant and rare bacterioplankton would respond taxonomically and functionally to river damming using 16S rRNA gene sequencing combined with Geochip microarray technique. Our results showed that abundant sub-community dominated taxonomic composition while rare sub-community largely determined functional composition. It is also observed that taxonomic diversity of abundant sub-community was significantly stimulated in the reservoir while that of rare sub-community was markedly inhibited. Moreover, abundant sub-community exhibited functional redundancy under damming disturbances since altered taxonomic composition and unaltered functional composition co-occurred simultaneously. Meanwhile, due to portfolio effect, rare sub-community maintained a greater stability under damming disturbances with little variation in taxonomic and functional compositions. In addition, the Stegen null model analysis revealed that stochastic process governed community assembly in both abundant and rare sub-communities. However, according to source tracking analysis, the taxonomic dispersion of abundant sub-community was less significantly impeded by the dam while the functional dispersion of rare sub-community was less strongly interrupted, indicating that the dispersal process in the dominated sub-community was less susceptible to damming. Therefore, by considering bacterioplankton functional traits, our study provided comprehensive evidences for the distinct strategies of abundant and rare sub-communities in response to damming.

Keywords: Community assembly; Functional traits; Rare taxa; River damming; Stochastic process.