99th ESA Annual Meeting (August 10 -- 15, 2014)

OOS 26

Communities Writ Small: Integrating Microbial Systems into Community Ecology

The goal of this session is to bring together researchers from across community ecology and microbial ecology whose work provides successful examples of how concepts and theory from community ecology are being explored and tested using microbial systems of species. Macro-organismal systems receive predominant experimental focus in community ecology, and yet ecological drivers (speciation, drift, selection, dispersal) are equally present in microbial systems, and microbial systems allow experimental manipulations over spatial and temporal scales (relative to body size and generation time) that are not easily achieved in larger systems. This provides a unique opportunity to explore community dynamics, to experiment with eco-evolutionary processes, and to follow evolutionary changes over rapid time scales. Speakers will discuss cutting edge work with microbes looking at the effects of historical contingency and species interactions on community assembly, the evolution of niches, the amount and implications of functional diversity in communities, and community responses to extreme environmental changes. Further, microbial communities are important to human and ecosystem health, and contain the most abundant and diverse organisms on the planet. They provide unique information on the range of forms natural and engineered ecological communities can take, and the relationship between community structure and function. Invited speakers will highlight the effects of disturbance intensity and frequency on microbial community structure and function, the assembly of the human microbiome, and the properties of engineered communities in water and waste treatment facilities.