Aquaculture accounts for an extremely valuable and rapidly expanding sector of global food production, yet its environmental impacts on aquatic ecosystems have attracted much concern. In this study, we collected water samples from eastern Lake Taihu, China. We targeted sites varying in their intensity of aquacultural activities and sampled them over multiple seasons. For each sample, we measured physicochemical variables, and we sequenced the 16S rRNA gene of the respective bacterial communities using an Illumina second-generation sequencing platform. Marked differences in diversity and bacterial community composition were observed between seasons, whereas we observed relatively weak differences between sites. Remarkable differences in the abundance of the bacterial community were observed at the phylum and genus levels across the different seasons. Stochastic processes dominated the assembly of bacterial communities in the aquaculture-influenced systems, and the assembly processes of bacterial community differed between seasons. Our observations highlight the effect of seasonality on bacterial communities and provide a more complete knowledge base for the proper assessment of the effects of aquacultural activities on freshwater ecosystems.
Keywords: Aquaculture; Bacterial composition; Community assembly; Seasons; Stochastic processes.
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