Patterns of Local Adaptation in Space and Time among Soil Bacteria

Our understanding of microbial biogeography has been governed by the dictum Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects. In other words, the distribution of microbes is thought to occur in a regime of extensive dispersal and strong selection, generating local adaptation. However, direct tests of these assumptions are rare. Here, we investigate the extent of local adaptation in space and time of a collection of soil-derived microbial isolates, most belonging to the genus Pseudomonas, across a growing season from a deciduous forest in western Quebec, Canada, using a reciprocal transplant design. Average performance of all clones varied substantially in both space and time, in line with the expectation of strong selection in both dimensions. The behavior of genotype-by-environment variance in fitness and its components, responsiveness and inconsistency, in space and through time suggests that the strength of divergent selection increases as sites become more distant from each other in both dimensions. However, divergent selection was not strong enough to maintain different specialized types across the environments studied, which suggests that Pseudomonas and their close relatives are not locally adapted to the prevailing conditions of growth.