THESIS
2022
1 online resource (xii, 191 pages) : illustrations (some color)
Abstract
Microeukaryotes are diverse with different trophic modes and play important roles in many
habitats. Same to other microorganisms, their communities are fundamentally affected by
several deterministic (e.g., environmental selection) and stochastic (e.g., ecological drift)
processes. How this suite of different processes regulates the biogeography of microeukaryotes
remains to be comprehensively explored. In this thesis, microeukaryotic community and its
regulating ecological processes were explored at different habitats including coastal, pelagic
ocean and cold seep sediment. The results showed that (1) heterogeneous selection mainly
regulated the phytoplankton (both eukaryotic and prokaryotic) communities in the Pacific
Ocean, with varying relative importance (compared with other proces...[
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Microeukaryotes are diverse with different trophic modes and play important roles in many
habitats. Same to other microorganisms, their communities are fundamentally affected by
several deterministic (e.g., environmental selection) and stochastic (e.g., ecological drift)
processes. How this suite of different processes regulates the biogeography of microeukaryotes
remains to be comprehensively explored. In this thesis, microeukaryotic community and its
regulating ecological processes were explored at different habitats including coastal, pelagic
ocean and cold seep sediment. The results showed that (1) heterogeneous selection mainly
regulated the phytoplankton (both eukaryotic and prokaryotic) communities in the Pacific
Ocean, with varying relative importance (compared with other processes) across spaces due to
the spatial scale, traits of phytoplankton and environmental gradients; (2) Ocean current, by
promoting species dispersal, played important roles in the connectivity between local
microeukaryotic communities in coastal regions. It largely homogenized the community (by
homogenizing dispersal) and reduced the effects of environmental selection, leading to the
weak relations between community composition and measured environmental factors; (3)
Microeukaryotic communities in the cold seep sediment, represented by abundant and diverse
parasitic taxa, were regionally divergent with local phylogenesis. Relative higher species
dispersal rate and heterogeneous selection (mainly from metazoans) made active cold seep as hotspots for microeukaryotic diversity. These mechanistic findings deepen our understanding
of community ecology of microeukaryotes and provide indications for conservations of marine
biodiversity.
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