The ecology of bacterial communities in groundwater of industrial areas: Diversity, composition, network, and assembly

Abstract

Groundwater provides freshwater resources necessary for mankind, but its quality is significantly impacted by anthropologic activities. The unique characteristics of groundwater provide a special niche for bacterial colonization. To maintain the sustainability of groundwater ecosystem, a good understanding of the influencing factors and assembly mechanisms for bacterial communities is necessary. Here, we investigated the bacterial communities of groundwater from two industrial zones in Shanghai, a highly industrialized city, during the wet and dry seasons using the high-throughput sequencing technology. Our study uncovered the significant effects of season, geographical location, and industrial type on the diversity and composition of groundwater bacterial communities, particularly, we found that season was the most dominant factor with much stronger influences (give the explanation 17.7%) in comparison with geographical location (8.8%) and industrial type (7.5%). Co-occurrence networks revealed that geographical location explained more variations of bacterial ecological network than season did. Both distance-decay of similarities and variation partitioning analyses indicated that the assembly of groundwater bacterial communities was more governed by environmental filtering compared to spatial-related dispersal. Finally, null model analysis suggested the role of stochastic processes, including dispersal and drift, in shaping the groundwater bacterial communities cannot be ignored. These findings would benefit to improve our understanding of the bacterial communities in groundwater ecosystem and provide a theoretical foundation for groundwater health management.

Keywords: Bacterial community; Biogeography; Community assembly; Groundwater; Industrial activities; Season pattern.