Abstract
Microbial communities in many ecosystems are facing a broad range of global change scenarios, resulting in microbial changes and possibly regime shifts with unknown ecological consequences. While the influence of single stressors is already described in numerous studies, the effects of multiple stressors working simultaneously are still poorly understood. In this study, we used 240 highly replicable oxic/anoxic aquatic lab micro-ecosystems to understand the influence of four stressors (fertilizer, glyphosate, metal pollution, antibiotics) in all possible combinations at three different temperatures (20 °C, 24 °C, and 28 °C) to shed light into consequences of multiple stressors on different levels of organization, ranging from species abundance to community and ecosystem parameters. Our data reveal that (i) combination of specific stressors can change the biological consequence and direction compared to single stressors in all levels of organisation (ii), effects of stressor combinations are modified by temperature, and (iii) that the number of stressors applied also lead to significant changes. In sum, our study confirmed the need of investigating multiple stressors working simultaneously across different ecological levels of organisation.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Competing interests The authors declare no competing financial interests.