Version 1
: Received: 28 September 2024 / Approved: 30 September 2024 / Online: 30 September 2024 (14:35:11 CEST)
How to cite:
Köhler, M.; Ehrhardt, L.; Günther, P. M.; Cao, J. Soil Bacteria in Archaeology: What Could Rank Abundance Functions Report on Ancient Human Impacts on Microbial Communities?. Preprints2024, 2024092410. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.2410.v1
Köhler, M.; Ehrhardt, L.; Günther, P. M.; Cao, J. Soil Bacteria in Archaeology: What Could Rank Abundance Functions Report on Ancient Human Impacts on Microbial Communities?. Preprints 2024, 2024092410. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.2410.v1
Köhler, M.; Ehrhardt, L.; Günther, P. M.; Cao, J. Soil Bacteria in Archaeology: What Could Rank Abundance Functions Report on Ancient Human Impacts on Microbial Communities?. Preprints2024, 2024092410. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.2410.v1
APA Style
Köhler, M., Ehrhardt, L., Günther, P. M., & Cao, J. (2024). Soil Bacteria in Archaeology: What Could Rank Abundance Functions Report on Ancient Human Impacts on Microbial Communities?. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.2410.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Köhler, M., Peter Mike Günther and Jialan Cao. 2024 "Soil Bacteria in Archaeology: What Could Rank Abundance Functions Report on Ancient Human Impacts on Microbial Communities?" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202409.2410.v1
Abstract
Metagenomic analysis of soil bacterial communities based on 16S rRNA reflects typical a community composition containing a low number of high abundance types and a very high number of low abundance types. Here, the formation of characteristic rank order functions of bacterial abundance is investigated by modelling the dynamics of soil bacterial communities assuming a succession of different bacterial populations that grow rapidly and decay more slowly. It was found that the characteristic shape of typical rank order functions is well reflected by the simulations. In addition, the model allowed to investigating strong disturbances of the soil, which could be expected in case of strongly changing local environmental conditions in the soil, e.g. by translocation and covering of soil material. Such events could lead to the formation of shoulders in the rank order functions. Abundance rank orders observed in case of some archaeological soil samples do indeed show such a shoulder and could be well interpreted by simulated rank order functions. As a result, it can be concluded that the investigations support the hypothesis, that abundance rank orders contain information about the temporal order of developing bacterial types in changing communities and thus store information about local environmental conditions in the past, including ancient human impacts on soil.
Keywords
Bacterial communities; Soil; Archaeology; Rank order functions; Modelling; Human Impact
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
