The School of Biology welcomes University of Wisconsin-Madison Associate Professor Trina McMahon on "Variation in Freshwater Bacterial Communities and Populations: Evolution and Ecology."

Abstract:
Bacterial communities are provide critical ecosystem services in freshwater lakes, processing large quantities of both autochthonous and allochthonous organic matter and controlling water quality. Their communities and populations vary in space and time in response to ecological and evolutionary forces, much like macro-scale organisms. We can identify clear hierarchies in the effects of these forces. In this seminar I will present data collected over the past ten years at the North Temperate Lakes Microbial Observatory and Long Term Ecological Research site to illustrate the power of long-term time series for the inference of both ecological and evolutionary processes acting on the arguably most important components of lake ecosystems: microbes.