Temporal and Depth‐Driven Variability of Pelagic Bacterial Communities in Lake Erie: Biofilm and Plankton Dynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite constituting an important component of freshwater ecosystems, biofilm assemblages have remained relatively understudied compared to plankton, especially in freshwater systems such as the western basin of Lake Erie (WBLE). This study therefore aimed to elucidate temporal and vertical shifts of microbial communities of planktonic and biofilm growth on artificial substrates in the WBLE water column at discrete depths, investigating the overlap of shared taxa between community types. Sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene revealed concurrent biofilm-plankton samples shared a low percentage (~10%) of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) indicating distinct communities between free-living and substrate-attached bacteria. Plankton communities did not significantly differ between surface and bottom depths (1 and 8 m), whereas biofilm communities differed between upper (1-4 m) and lower (5-8 m) water columns. Temporal variation in community composition was observed in biofilm, with early periods (June-July) showing significant dissimilarity followed by compositional convergence in late summer onwards (August-October). With the expansion of artificial infrastructure in aquatic systems, there is novel substrate material to observe spatiotemporal patterns of microbial colonisation throughout the pelagic zone. These results demonstrate the complexity of bacterial biofilm communities from plankton in freshwater, providing insight into microbial assembly through temporal succession and across depth.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".