Table 1.
Summary of the sequencing results.
Figure 1.
Kelp surface and seawater bacterial communities at the level of phyla.
“Kelp” refers to the kelp surface samples; “Water-In” refers to the seawater samples adjacent to the kelp sampled; “Water-Out” refers to the seawater sampled outside the perimeter of the kelp forest.
Table 2.
Most dominant OTUs in all sites sampled for this study and their average relative abundances (as percentages of all sample 16S rRNA gene sequences recovered).
Table 3.
OTUs at 97% similarity, which were found in all kelp surface samples, presented as their contribution to the whole community (% of the total bacterial sequences).
Figure 2.
Bacterial distribution of the most abundant groups within the predominant classes of the Proteobacterial phylum.
The Alpha- (A), Gamma- (B) and Betaproteobacteria (C) were consistently present in high abundances in all of the samples. A further evaluation within these classes showed differences in the profiles and abundance of the bacterial groups in seawater and on the kelp surface. X-axis sample designation is the same as Figure 1.
Figure 3.
Unweighted UniFrac principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) plots computed at exactly 510 sequences/sample illustrate the relationship between sample type (blue = water, red = kelp) community similarities.
Percentages of variance explained by each principal coordinate (P1 and P2) are shown on the x- and y-axes.
Figure 4.
Weighed UniFrac principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) computed at exactly 510 sequences/sample illustrate the influence of sample type (Fig. 4A) and sample collection date (Fig. 4B).
The coloring reflects the different dates on which the samples were taken (green = March, blue = April, red = May). “Kelp” refers to the kelp surface samples; “Water” refers to the seawater samples adjacent to the kelp sampled as well as those sampled outside the perimeter of the kelp forest. Percentages of variance explained by each principal coordinate (P1 and P2) are shown on the x- and y-axes.