Date: 2009-11-27
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New research on bacterial communities throughout six large Arctic river ecosystems reveals predictable temporal patterns, suggesting that scientists could use these communities as markers for monitoring climate change in the polar regions. The study, published this week in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition," shows that bacterial communities in the six rivers shifted synchronously over time, correlating with seasonal shifts in hydrology and biogeochemistry.
(Media-Newswire.com) - New research on bacterial communities throughout six large Arctic river ecosystems reveals predictable temporal patterns, suggesting that scientists could use these communities as markers for monitoring climate change in the polar regions. The study, published this week in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition," shows that bacterial communities in the six rivers shifted synchronously over time, correlating with seasonal shifts in hydrology and biogeochemistry.
The research team, led by University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science researcher Byron Crump and by marine science professor Rainer Amon of Texas A&M University at Galveston, documents these patterns through a 3-year, circumpolar study of planktonic bacterial communities in the six largest rivers of the pan-arctic watershed: the Ob’, Yenisey, Lena, Kolyma, Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers.
“Our results demonstrate that synchrony, seasonality and annual reassembly in planktonic bacterial communities occur on global scales,” said Crump. “Since bacterial communities in big arctic rivers shift predictably with circumpolar seasonal changes in environmental conditions, they may serve as sensitive indicators of climate change in the Arctic.”
“These six river systems we studied are comparable in size to the Mississippi River in the United States,” says Amon of Texas A&M University at Galveston. “One of the things we learned is the bacteria communities in all six of them seem to be very similar. There are many questions still to be answered, such as how these bacteria communities might respond to a continued increase in temperature.
“Many parts of these river systems are warming up faster than any other region on the planet. What can we expect if this area continues to go through such warming phases? What are the long-term consequences? Could these communities ultimately affect atmospheric conditions? This research may allow us to look into the future and see how these communities might respond to such changes. There has been very little research done previously on these river systems, so our work has contributed to the body of knowledge on this area. It gives us a better understanding of what is taking place in these bacteria communities and how we can proceed from there.”
This synchrony indicates that hemisphere-scale variation in seasonal climate sets the pace of variation in microbial diversity. Moreover, these seasonal communities reassembled each year in all six rivers, suggesting a long-term, predictable succession in the composition of big river bacterial communities.
Divergence from this synchronous pattern may provide an early signal of climate change in some regions of the Arctic, and may result in changes to river microbial communities and the biogeochemical transformations they carry out.
Data for this study was collected through the PARTNERS program, a collaboration among scientists from the U.S., Canada and Russia examining the largest rivers of the pan-arctic watershed. By including five of the world’s 25 largest rivers in the study, the results provide a unique perspective on global-scale patterns in bacterial diversity.
The article, “Circumpolar synchrony in big river bacterioplankton,” appears in the current "PNAS Early Edition." The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Contact: Chris Conner at (443) 496-0095 or cconner@umces.edu or Rainer Amon at (409) 740-4719 or Keith Randall at (979) 845-4644 or keith-randall@tamu.edu
About research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $582 million, which ranks third nationally for universities without a medical school, and underwrites approximately 3,500 sponsored projects. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.
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