Environmental controls and habitat connectivity of phototrophic microbial mats and bacterioplankton communities in an Antarctic freshwater system

Abstract

Freshwater ecosystems are considered hotspots of biodiversity in Antarctic polar deserts. Anticipated warming is expected to change the hydrology of these systems due to increased meltwater and reduction of ice cover, with implications for environmental conditions and physical connectivity between habitats. Using 16S rRNA sequencing, we evaluated the structure of microbial mat and planktonic communities within a connected watershed in the McMurdo Wright Valley, Antarctica to determine the roles of connectivity and habitat conditions in controlling microbial assemblage composition. We examined benthic and planktonic samples from glacial Lake Brownworth, the perennially ice-covered Lake Vanda, and the Onyx River, which connects the two. In Lake Vanda, we found distinct microbial assemblages occupying sub-habitats at different lake depths, while the communities from Lake Brownworth and Onyx River were structurally similar between them. Despite the higher connectivity between bacterial communities in the shallow parts of the system, environmental filtering dominated over dispersal in driving bacterial community structure. Functional metagenomics predictions identified genes related to degradation of halogenated aromatic compounds in surface microbial mats exposed to changes in water regimes, which progressively disappeared with increasing depth. Shifting environmental conditions due to increasing connectivity, rather than dispersal, may become the dominant drivers of bacterial diversity and functioning in Antarctic freshwater ecosystems.