Lake Mendota, Wisconsin, is a test

Lake Mendota, Wisconsin, is a test bed for lake microbial ecosystems. Dam et al. (2016) used a PLM based on modified Lotka–Volterra models, including growth based on environmental variables (e.g., temperature and ammonia/phosphorus) and pairwise interactions, to simulate the dynamics of a microbial community. They developed two levels of the model and compared them with 16S rRNA observations. The first level simulates 14 subcommunities that are defined based on their seasonal patterns, contain a broad range of operational taxonomic units, and together encompass the entire metapopulation (see figure 3 in Dam et al. 2016). The model parameters suggest a strong positive influence of environmental factors and negative pairwise interactions. In the second level, individual operational taxonomic units are broken out from the subcommunities and simulated individually (see figure 5 in Dam et al. 2016). The optimized environmental parameters are consistent with the literature. For example, a positive effect of ammonia for a member of Nitrosomonadaceae was consistent with observations of ammonia oxidation from members of this group.