Terrestrial landscape as the main driver of bacterioplankton communities along a hydrological network located in the...

The study of aquatic ecosystems as hydrologic networks requires a metacommunity framework, in which local bacterioplankton communities are interconnected via water movement across the landscape. While evidence suggests that a balance between selection (deterministic) and dispersal (stochastic) processes drives bacterioplankton community composition, little attention has been given to examining the impact of the surrounding terrestrial landscape on these aquatic communities. In this study, we assessed the relative importance of terrestrial landscape composition, local aquatic conditions, and dendritic distance for explaining the variation in aquatic bacterial communities along a small Amazonian hydrological network. Land cover composition had more explanatory power than local aquatic conditions and dendritic distance in explaining bacterial community dissimilarity, particularly in headwaters. Additionally, we observed significant differences in bacterioplankton composition between oxbow lakes and streams, which substantially differed according to local aquatic conditions. These findings underscore the critical role of both local aquatic conditions and terrestrial heterogeneity along the aquatic network in determining bacterioplankton communities. Finally, we identified shifts in the abundance of some bacterial classes associated with terrestrial heterogeneity and aquatic conditions. Our results highlight the crucial role of the terrestrial surrounding landscape as an element that interacts with hydrology and local aquatic conditions in shaping bacterioplankton community structure. Our results contribute to improve our understanding of the processes that drive the dynamics of freshwater bacterioplankton metacommunities and establish clear links between freshwater and surrounding terrestrial environments. These findings advance our knowledge of processes at the land-water interface and may inspire innovative approaches to ecosystem conservation and biomonitoring strategies that include bacterioplankton.