Quenched Disorder in Landscapes Leads to Shifts in Microbial Population Scaling

Understanding mechanisms shaping distributions and interactions of soil microbes is essential for determining their impact on large scale ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, climate regulation, waste decomposition and nutrient cycling. As the functional unit of soil ecosystems, we focus our attention on the spatial structure of soil macroaggregates. Emulating this complex physico-chemical environment as a patchy habitat landscape we investigate on-chip the effect of changing the connectivity features of this landscape as Escherichia coli forms a metapopulation. We analyze the distributions of E. coli occupancy using Taylor's law, an empirical law in ecology which asserts that the fluctuations in populations is a power law function of the mean. We provide experimental evidence that bacterial metapopulations in patchy habitat landscapes on microchips follow this law. Furthermore, we find that increased disorder of patch-corridor connectivity leads to a qualitative transition in the fluctuation scaling. We discuss these results in the context of the spatial ecology of microbes in soil.