Microbial communities are not the easiest to manipulate experimentally in natural ecosystems. However, leaf litter – topmost layer of surface soil – is uniquely suitable to investigate the complexities of community assembly. Here, we reflect on over a decade of collaborative work to address this topic using leaf litter as a model system in southern California ecosystems. By leveraging a number of methodological advantages of the system, we have worked to demonstrate how four processes – selection, dispersal, drift, and diversification – contribute to bacterial and fungal community assembly and ultimately, impact community functioning. Although many dimensions remain to be investigated, our initial results demonstrate that both ecological and evolutionary processes occur simultaneously to influence microbial community assembly. We propose that the development of additional and experimentally tractable microbial systems will be enormously valuable to test the role of eco-evolutionary processes in natural settings and their implications in the face of rapid global change.

中文翻译：

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使用模型凋落物系统研究野外微生物群落组装的生态进化过程

微生物群落并不是最容易在自然生态系统中进行实验操作的。然而，落叶层——表土的最上层——非常适合研究群落组装的复杂性。在这里，我们回顾了十多年来利用落叶层作为南加州生态系统模型系统来解决这一主题的合作工作。通过利用该系统的许多方法学优势，我们努力证明了四个过程——选择、分散、漂移和多样化——如何促进细菌和真菌群落的组装，并最终影响群落的功能。尽管许多方面仍有待研究，但我们的初步结果表明，生态和进化过程同时发生，影响微生物群落的组装。我们认为，开发额外的、实验上易于处理的微生物系统对于测试生态进化过程在自然环境中的作用及其在面对快速全球变化时的影响将具有巨大的价值。