Chuck Pepe-Ranney edited Discussion.tex  almost 10 years ago

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\section{Discussion}   \subsection{Biomass Pool Size}  The goal of this study was to evaluate how changes in resource stoichiometry affected the biomass pool size, diversity, and membership of planktonic and biofilm communities. Our results suggest that carbon subsidies increased bacterial biomass in both plankton and biofilm communities as predicted. Carbon subsidies also resulted in decreased algal biomass in the plankton community, but there was no signifcant change in algal biomass of the biofilm communities among resource treatments. The changes in the biomass pool size that did occurr were consistent with changing relationships (commensal to competitive) between the autotrophic and heterotrophic components of the plankton communities but not neccessarily of the biofilm communities.  Beyond changes in the biomass pool size of each community we further explored how shifts in C:P affected a) the diversity and membership of each community, and b) the relationship/interaction between the planktonic and biofilm communities. We found that changes in biomass pool size of the various communities were associated with changes in community structure but not neccesarrily in an intuitive manner. Here we highlight three key results that we find important for understanding the assembly of aquatic biofilms. First, biofilm community richness was consistently higher than the planktonic community richness. Second, for the C:P = 10 and C:P = 100 resource treatments and the control treatment the membership of the bacterial and plankton communities did not overlap but membership of the two communities in the highest C:P treatment (C:P = 500) did. Third, while carbon subsides increased the bacterial biomass pool size in both the plankton and the biofilm and decreased the algal abundance in the plankton community as hypothesized, the resource treatments did not have similar affects on membership among the two communities. Specifically, the highest level of carbon subsidies resulted in a merging of membership in the bacterioplankton and bacteriofilm communities that increased over time but the same membership pattern was not observed for the algal biofilm and plankton communities.