Microbial Ecology in a Changing Climate

In William Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, exiled members of a French duchy are banished to the Forest of Arden where they experience the freedom and liberty that can be derived from living in harmony with the bounty of nature’s provisions. In the quote above, the banished Duke Senior observes that in spite of the adversity of banishment, the forest ecosystem provides more wealth than he previously recognized. Today, the adversity in front of us is not banishment to the natural world, rather it is to understand how best to protect our natural world, particularly our coastal systems, from the combined assaults of population growth and climate change. Much like Duke Senior can find sermons in stones, we can find solutions to the effects of changing climates on the metabolisms of microbes that live in our estuaries. From storing carbon to removing nitrogen (N), the ecosystem functions performed by estuarine microbes are essential to maintaining key ecosystem services provided by estuaries. Understanding what controls the distribution, assembly, and interactions within these microbial systems is imperative for predicting future responses to disturbance and for harnessing their power to facilitate the preservation and restoration of estuarine habitats. Here, we describe the microbial communities that are critical to estuaries and the key habitats where they reside, the mechanisms that underlie the assembly of those communities, and the key microbial metabolisms that affect ecosystem performance. We then point to challenges and opportunities for incorporating microbes and their interactions in understanding climate change impacts in the future. Microbial processes underlie many important ecosystem services provided by estuaries. How climate change will affect these microbial communities and the essential processes they perform is poorly constrained yet is essential for predicting how microbially mediated ecosystem services will change under future climate scenarios. The most abundant phylogenetic group found across estuarine habitats were the Proteobacteria, which was also reported to be the dominant group in the bacterioplankton of nine major global estuaries. Fungi in estuaries and other marine systems remain understudied relative to terrestrial systems, and marine fungi account for a very small percentage of known fungal species. Viruses play a critical role in nutrient and carbon cycling, and microbial biomass turnover, so understanding how viruses and their hosts will be affected by climate change is critical to accurate modeling of climate change impacts. Estuaries support a tremendous diversity of microbial life because of the multiple diverse niche spaces contained within these systems.

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