Disturbance History Shapes Microbial Community Assembly and Predictability in a Continuous Culture System.

Repeated minor salinity pulses and recovery intervals influence microbial community responses, with disturbance history altering richness and stochasticity after a major salinity pulse.

• Why it matters: Understanding how past disturbances affect microbial community assembly is crucial for predicting ecosystem responses to environmental changes, yet this remains poorly understood.
• What they did: A controlled continuous culture experiment with 26 time points over 50 days examined two different histories of repeated salinity pulses and their effects on bacterial communities, focusing on responses to a subsequent major salinity pulse.
• The result: Disturbance history affected the magnitude and direction of richness changes and increased stochasticity after the major pulse, highlighting that disturbance sequence and recovery time shape microbial stability and assembly processes.