Transience after disturbance: Obligate species recovery dynamics depend on disturbance duration

Low recovery of bacterial community after an extreme salinization-desalinization cycle

Background

Understanding the recovery of bacterial communities after extreme environmental disturbances offers key opportunities to investigate ecosystem resilience. However, it is not yet clear whether bacterial communities can rebound to their pre-disturbance levels. To shed light on this issue, we tracked the responses of bacterial communities during an extreme salinization-desalinization cycle.

Results

Our results showed that salinization-up process induced an ecological succession, shifting from a community dominated by Betaproteobacteria to Gammaproteobacteria. Within the desalinization-down process, taxon-specific recovery trajectories varied profoundly, with only Gammaproteobacteria returning to their initial levels, of which Alphaproteobacteria was the most prominent member. The α-diversity indices gradually increased at oligosaline environment (0.03‰ to 3‰) and subsequently decreased profoundly at hypersaline condition (10‰ to 90‰). However, the indices did not return to pre-disturbance level along the previous trajectory observed during the desalinization. Approximately half of the original OTUs were not detected during desalinization, suggesting that the seed bank may be damaged by the hypersaline environment. Moreover, Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States (PICRUSt) implied that the osmosensors’ capacity of bacterial communities was also impaired by the hypersaline condition.

Conclusions

These results suggested that the bacterial communities showed a low recovery after the extreme salinization-desalinization cycle.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (10.1186/s12866-018-1333-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.