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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025

Title: Synthesis of recovery patterns in microbial communities across environments
Abstract BackgroundDisturbances alter the diversity and composition of microbial communities. Yet a generalized empirical assessment of microbiome responses to disturbance across different environments is needed to understand the factors driving microbiome recovery, and the role of the environment in driving these patterns. ResultsTo this end, we combined null models with Bayesian generalized linear models to examine 86 time series of disturbed mammalian, aquatic, and soil microbiomes up to 50 days following disturbance. Overall, disturbances had the strongest effect on mammalian microbiomes, which lost taxa and later recovered their richness, but not their composition. In contrast, following disturbance, aquatic microbiomes tended away from their pre-disturbance composition over time. Surprisingly, across all environments, we found no evidence of increased compositional dispersion (i.e., variance) following disturbance, in contrast to the expectations of the Anna Karenina Principle. ConclusionsThis is the first study to systematically compare secondary successional dynamics across disturbed microbiomes, using a consistent temporal scale and modeling approach. Our findings show that the recovery of microbiomes is environment-specific, and helps to reconcile existing, environment-specific research into a unified perspective.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1749544
PAR ID:
10509959
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Springer Nature
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Microbiome
Volume:
12
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2049-2618
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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