Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Streamwater Microbial Communities as Hydrologic Observation: Insights Gained from Investigation of a Novel Dataset

Public Deposited

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/qz20t1295

Descriptions

Attribute NameValues
Creator
Abstract
  • Interactions and feedbacks among climate change effects and continued human impacts will exacerbate impacts to water resources in complex ways. An urgent imperative of the hydrologic community is to understand the response of hydrologic systems to these perturbations, thus contributing to long-term sustainability of water resources in an uncertain future. Critical to anticipating and mitigating changes to water resources is a thorough characterization of hydrologic processes across a variety of systems and spatiotemporal scales. However, major gaps in our understanding persist, particularly regarding the movement of water through the catchment and streamflow generation, despite decades of research supported by large amounts of highly complex hydrological observation data. We suggest that a new type of information-rich data, which can be easily collected and analyzed, might be the key to new insights that propel the field toward a deeper, more fundamental understanding of hydrologic processes. Genetic material (i.e., DNA) is a naturally-occurring, high-dimensional digitally-encoded dataset, and DNA analysis has become much cheaper and more widely available in recent years. Microbial communities, characterized taxonomically by sequencing the 16S rRNA gene in DNA, are highly diverse and respond dynamically to environmental conditions. Here, we investigate the streamwater microbial community as a novel hydrologic dataset. We collected DNA samples over three years, from 2017-2020, from more than 60 streams across the Willamette, Deschutes, and John Day watersheds, three large and characteristically divergent watersheds in Oregon, USA. We found that differences in microbial community composition among streams, particularly in headwater streams, was statistically related to differences in geomorphic and climatic characteristics of the drainage catchment. We furthermore found through an information-theoretic approach, that specific summer community constituents (i.e., microbial taxa) were related to stream discharge metrics at multiple temporal and flow scales. We also observed that streamwater microbial diversity exhibited a rich and dynamic response to event hydrograph dynamics on the Marys River in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. In that analysis, we furthermore classified microbial taxa (and broader phylogenetic groups) according to whether they are mobilized or diluted with streamflow, potentially contributing new insights regarding the sources of streamflow, as well as a new way of characterizing taxa in microbial ecology studies. Results of this research support further investigation of the hydrologic information encoded within microbial communities, as well as ways in which the field might best extract and apply this new information to further our understanding of hydrologic systems and contribute fresh insight to unsolved questions in hydrology.
License
Resource Type
Date Issued
Degree Level
Degree Name
Degree Field
Degree Grantor
Commencement Year
Advisor
Academic Affiliation
Rights Statement
Funding Statement (additional comments about funding)
  • This work was supported the National Science Foundation grant EAR 1836768. DRU was supported in part by a STEM Scholarship from NSF grant #1153490. Data and facilities for a portion of this research were provided by the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest and Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, administered cooperatively by the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, Oregon State University, and the Willamette National Forest. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under the LTER Grants: LTER8 DEB-2025755 (2020-2026) and LTER7 DEB-1440409 (2012-2020).
Publisher
Peer Reviewed
Language
Embargo reason
  • Pending Publication
Embargo date range
  • 2022-03-18 to 2023-04-19

Relationships

Parents:

This work has no parents.

In Collection:

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details URyckiDawnR2022.pdf 2022-03-18 Public Download