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Bacterial diversity in snow from mid-latitude mountain areas: Alps, Eastern Anatolia, Karakoram and Himalaya.

Citation

MGnify (2018). Bacterial diversity in snow from mid-latitude mountain areas: Alps, Eastern Anatolia, Karakoram and Himalaya.. Sampling event dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/firfns accessed via GBIF.org on 2025-06-13.

Description

Snow can be considered an independent ecosystem that hosts active microbial communities. Snow microbial assemblages have been extensively investigated in the Arctic and in the Antarctica, but rarely in mid-latitude mountain areas. In this study, we investigated the bacterial communities of snow collected in four glacierized areas (Alps, Eastern Anatolia, Karakoram and Himalaya) by high-throughput DNA sequencing. We also investigated the origin of the air masses that produced the sampled snowfalls by reconstructing back-trajectories. A standardized approach was applied to all the analyses in order to ease comparison among different communities and geographical areas. The bacterial communities hosted from 25 to 211 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs), and their structure differed significantly between geographical areas. This suggests that snow bacterial communities may largely derive from ‘local' air bacteria, maybe by deposition of airborne particulate of local origin that occurs during snowfall. However, some evidence suggest that a contribution of bacteria collected during air mass uplift to snow communities cannot be excluded, particularly when the air mass that originated the snow event is particularly rich in dust.

Sampling Description

Sampling

Snow can be considered an independent ecosystem that hosts active microbial communities. Snow microbial assemblages have been extensively investigated in the Arctic and in the Antarctica, but rarely in mid-latitude mountain areas. In this study, we investigated the bacterial communities of snow collected in four glacierized areas (Alps, Eastern Anatolia, Karakoram and Himalaya) by high-throughput DNA sequencing. We also investigated the origin of the air masses that produced the sampled snowfalls by reconstructing back-trajectories. A standardized approach was applied to all the analyses in order to ease comparison among different communities and geographical areas. The bacterial communities hosted from 25 to 211 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs), and their structure differed significantly between geographical areas. This suggests that snow bacterial communities may largely derive from ‘local' air bacteria, maybe by deposition of airborne particulate of local origin that occurs during snowfall. However, some evidence suggest that a contribution of bacteria collected during air mass uplift to snow communities cannot be excluded, particularly when the air mass that originated the snow event is particularly rich in dust.

Method steps

  1. Pipeline used: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomics/pipelines/4.1

Taxonomic Coverages

Geographic Coverages

Bibliographic Citations

Contacts

originator
UNIMIB
metadata author
UNIMIB
administrative point of contact
UNIMIB
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