Figure 5

Posterior distribution and composition of seasonal assemblages in a coastal bacterial community. (A) Mixing probabilities for microbial assemblages at four distinct seasonal time points. Colors used to define seasons were spring equinox (SE) - green; summer solstice (SS) - red; autumn equinox (AE) - orange; and winter solstice (WS) - blue. Samples were from 24 surface (1 m) collections taken from 2005 to 2010 in the Bedford Basin, a coastal inlet of the temperate northwest Atlantic Ocean [35]. (B) Hierarchical clustering of OTU-mixing probabilities from the four seasonal assemblages in part (A). For these assemblages, a very large number of OTUs contribute 95% of the posterior density (PD), but a small subset contributes a disproportionately large amount of that density. We refer to this influential subset as the predominant OTUs and define them according to the inflection point in their posterior OTU distribution. For clarity, we clustered only the predominant OTUs. For SE, there were 15 predominant OTUs (75% of PD). For SS, there were 15 predominant OTUs (73% of PD). For AE, there were 17 predominant OTUs (62% of PD). For WS, there were 19 predominant OTUs (66% of PD). (C) Model-based predictions for the high-resolution time series collected biweekly from January to December in 2009.