Geographic Patterns of Bacterioplankton among Lakes of the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yangtze River Basin, China

Abstract In aquatic ecosystems, microbial biogeography research is critical for unveiling the mechanisms of microbial community succession. However, little is known about the microbial biogeography among interconnected lakes. To address this deficit, we used high-throughput sequencing to explore geographic patterns and the relative importance of ecological processes that shape these patterns in abundant and rare bacterial subcommunities from 25 lakes across the middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River basin (MLYB, located in southeast China), where most of the lakes are interconnected by river networks. We found that there were significant differences in both abundant and rare bacterial subcommunities between the two lake groups that were far from each other, while were no difference among the nearby lakes in each group. Both abundant and rare bacteria followed a strong distance-decay relationship, especially for rare bacteria. These findings suggest that although the interconnectivity between lakes breaks the geographical isolation of bacteria, the dispersal capability of bacterial taxa was still limited by geographic distance. We also found that although deterministic processes and stochastic processes together drive the bacterial subcommunities assembly, the stochastic processes (based on adjusted R 2 in redundancy analysis) exhibited a greater influence on bacterial subcommunities. Our results implied that bacterial dispersal among interconnected lakes was more stochastically. Importance Unraveling the relative importance of ecological processes regulating microbial community structure is a central goal in microbial ecology. In aquatic ecosystems, microbial communities often occur in spatially structured habitats, where connectivity directly affects dispersal and metacommunity processes. Recent theoretical work suggests that directional dispersal among connected habitats leads to higher variability in local diversity and among-community composition. However, the study of microbial biogeography among natural interconnected habitats is still lacking. The findings of this study revealed interesting phenomena of microbial biogeography among natural interconnected habitats, suggested that the high interconnectivity reduced the spatial heterogeneity of bacteria, and caused the dispersal of bacteria to be more stochastically. This study has provided a deeper understanding of the biogeographic patterns of rare and abundant bacterial taxa and their determined processes among interconnected aquatic habitats.