Stream sediment bacterial communities exhibit temporally-consistent and distinct thresholds to land use change in a mixed-use watershed

Abstract

Freshwater ecosystems are susceptible to biodiversity losses due to land conversion. This is particularly true for the conversion of land from forests for agriculture and urban development. Freshwater sediments harbor microorganisms that provide vital ecosystem services. In dynamic habitats like freshwater sediments, microbial communities can be shaped by many processes, although the relative contributions of environmental factors to microbial community dynamics remain unclear. Given the future projected increase in land use change, it is important to ascertain how associated changes in stream physico-chemistry will influence sediment microbiomes. Here, we characterized stream chemistry and sediment bacterial community composition along a mixed land-use gradient in West Virginia, USA across one growing season. Sediment bacterial community richness was unaffected by increasing anthropogenic land use, though microbial communities were compositionally distinct across sites. Community threshold analysis revealed greater community resilience to agricultural land use than urban land use. Further, predicted metagenomes suggest differences in potential microbial function across changes in land use. The results of this study suggest that low levels of urban land use change can alter sediment bacterial community composition and predicted functional capacity in a mixed-use watershed, which could impact stream ecosystem services in the face of global land use change.

Keywords: agriculture; change point; indicator taxa analysis; land conversion; microbial communities; urbanization.