Overview
- Attempts to address issues of scale of microbes juxtaposed with the footprint of their activities on the landscape
- Includes discussion of fungi in soils and planktonic microorganisms in water in an attempt to reconcile differences in scale of those organisms to their activity footprint
- Provides a primer on quantitative methods used to evaluate scale issues and distributions in an effort to allow readers to follow arguments presented in the various chapters, as well as to understand many presentations in the primary literature
- How microbial community spatial patterns correlate with environmental heterogeneity
- Considers a diversity of habitats (rhizosphere, surface soils, terrestrial subsurface, and aquatic environments) and a variety of spatial scales (µm to km)
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About this book
In my first microbiology class in 1968, Richard Wodzinki opened his first lecture with “Wodzinski’s Laws of Bacteriology. ” Those laws were (1) Bacteria are very very small, (2) Bacteria are our friends, and (3) Bacteria always have the last word. These simple statements motivated a career of curiosity, and started me on a wild ride of discovery with my miniscule colleagues. The realization that an entity so tiny could mediate critical ecological p- cesses observed across scales of kilometers begs for an explanation of how populations and communities are distributed within those large spaces. How big is a microbial community? Where does one stop and another start? Are there rules of organization of the communities into spatially discrete patches, and can those patches be correlated with observed processes and process rates? Over the years I have added what I tell my classes are “Mills’ Corrolaries to Wodzinski’s Laws. ” With respect to the topic of this volume, the corollaries to the first law are: (1a) But there are a whole lot of them, and (1b) They can grow very very fast. Again, distribution in space and time is a central theme, and it has motivated much of my effort over the last 30 years.
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Editors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Spatial Distribution of Microbes in the Environment
Editors: Rima B. Franklin, Aaron L. Mills
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6216-2
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life Sciences, Biomedical and Life Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-6215-5Published: 26 July 2007
Softcover ISBN: 978-90-481-7570-3Published: 19 October 2010
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4020-6216-2Published: 04 September 2007
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 333
Topics: Microbial Ecology, Statistics for Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, Biogeosciences