Figure 1.
Sketch of geographical location of the sampling stations (red dots in the insert) at the north-western part of the North Sea coast of the Dutch barrier island Schiermonnikoog.
The stations indicated with ST1, ST2 and ST3 refer to the stations sampled in a previous study [10] to which the current dataset is compared. See Materials and Methods for a description of the stations.
Table 1.
List of oligonucleotides used in this study.
Table 2.
Polymerase chain reaction mixtures and amplification conditions.
Figure 2.
Cluster analysis of microbial community fingerprints and concomitant DGGE patterns for a) bacterial community, b) cyanobacterial community, c) eukaryal community and d) archaeal community.
Figure 3.
Shannon diversity index (h) of the four different microbial communities averaged per zone.
Figure 4.
Relative contribution of photosynthetic pigments to the tidal (blue), intermediate (red) and upper (green).
Figure 5.
Average values per zone of total carbon (a), nitrogen (b), phosphate (c), C:N ratio (d), salinity (e) and water content (f).
Carbon, nitrogen en phosphate concentrations (in % w/w) of each sample were normalized for the chlorophyll-a concentration in that sample before averaging.
Figure 6.
RDA plot of bacterial community DGGE profiles of the transect samples along with the most significant environmental parameters (A) and pigments (B).
The ovals around the groups indicated the independent clusters of samples from the different mat types. Eigenvalues for axes 1 and 2 in A are 0.1611 and 0.1163, respectively, accounting for 28% of the total variance and in B are 0.1795 and 0.1082 respectively, accounting for 29% of the variance in the DGGE pattern data.