from Zhanshan (Sam) Ma, Jiawei Geng, Zaid Abdo and Larry J. Forney writing in Microbial Ecological Theory: Current Perspectives:
Microbial community dynamics is one of the most important central themes of microbial community ecology, which seems to be experiencing its first golden era thanks to the rapidly expanding datasets derived using metagenomic and other "omics" methods in microbial biology. For example, much of the ongoing NIH-HMP (Human Microbiome Project) focus has been centered on the dynamics of human microbiome communities. Microbial ecologists are beginning to actively draw upon ecological theories from macro ecology to study microbial communities. In this article, we present a brief review on several selected topics of ecological theories that are most relevant to community dynamics, including the diversity-stability paradigm, intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH), species area/time curves (SAT), species abundance distribution (SAD), and neutral community theory. In perspective, we suggest that the study of microbial community dynamics can not only benefit from applying ecological theories originally developed in macro ecology, but also contribute to the development and testing of new ecological theories. These bidirectional interactions are of critical importance to the flourishing of theoretical microbial ecology, and studies of microbial community dynamics offers tremendous opportunities for these intellectual exchanges to occur.
Further reading: Microbial Ecological Theory: Current Perspectives