Microbiome functioning depends on individual and interactive effects of the environment and community structure

How ecosystem functioning changes with microbial communities remains an open question in natural ecosystems. Both present-day environmental conditions and historical events, such as past differences in dispersal, can have a greater influence over ecosystem function than the diversity or abundance of both taxa and genes. Here, we estimated how individual and interactive effects of microbial community structure defined by diversity and abundance, present-day environmental conditions, and an indicator of historical legacies influenced ecosystem functioning in lake sediments. We studied sediments because they have strong gradients in all three of these ecosystem properties and deliver important functions worldwide. By characterizing bacterial community composition and functional traits at eight sites fed by discrete and contrasting catchments, we found that taxonomic diversity and the normalized abundance of oxidase-encoding genes explained as much variation in CO₂ production as present-day gradients of pH and organic matter quantity and quality. Functional gene diversity was not linked to CO₂ production rates. Surprisingly, the effects of taxonomic diversity and normalized oxidase abundance in the model predicting CO₂ production were attributable to site-level differences in bacterial communities unrelated to the present-day environment, suggesting that colonization history rather than habitat-based filtering indirectly influenced ecosystem functioning. Our findings add to limited evidence that biodiversity and gene abundance explain patterns of microbiome functioning in nature. Yet we highlight among the first time how these relationships depend directly on present-day environmental conditions and indirectly on historical legacies, and so need to be contextualized with these other ecosystem properties.