North Temperate Lakes

As the size and extent of biological data sets grow, scientists turn to new quantitative techniques, such as network analysis, to understand biological complexity over large scales. For network analysis of microbial datasets, topological ‘co-occurrence’ networks are generated from correlative metrics, in which nodes represent observed variables and significant correlations are represented by the edges connecting them. We used an unprecedented decade-long time series of freshwater bacterioplankton molecular community fingerprints to test the following hypotheses: (1) community co-occurrence networks from this sample set are non-random, (2) seasonality explains the organization and complexity of co-occurrence networks, and (3) community richness and diversity correlate to co-occurrence network complexity.