Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-8-2021
Keywords
bacterial community, fecal pollution, rivers, sewage
Abstract
Microbial water quality is generally monitored by culturable fecal indicator bacteria (FIB), which are intended to signal human health risk due to fecal pollution. However, FIB have limited utility in most urbanized watersheds as they do not discriminate among fecal pollution sources, tend to make up a small fraction of the total microbial community, and do not inform on pollution impacts on the native ecosystem. To move beyond these limitations, we assessed entire bacterial communities and investigated how bacterial diversity relates to traditional ecological and human health-relevant water quality indicators throughout the Milwaukee River Basin. Samples were collected from 16 sites on 5 days during the summer, including both wet and dry weather events, and were processed by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Historical water quality at each sampling location, as opposed to upstream land use, was associated significantly with bacterial community alpha diversity. Source partitioning the sequence data was important for determining water quality relationships. Sewage-associated bacterial sequences were detected in all samples, and the relative abundance of sewage sequences was strongly associated with the human Bacteroides fecal marker. From this relationship, we developed a preliminary threshold for human sewage pollution when using bacterial community sequence data. Certain abundant freshwater bacterial sequences were also associated with human fecal pollution, suggesting their possible utility in water quality monitoring. This study sheds light on how bacterial community analysis can be used to supplement current water quality monitoring techniques to better understand interactions between ecological water quality and human health indicators.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
McClary-Gutierrez, Jill; Driscoll, Zac; and Nenn, Cheryl, "Human fecal contamination corresponds to changes in the freshwater bacterial communities of a large river basin" (2021). Freshwater Faculty Articles. 10.
https://dc.uwm.edu/freshwater_facarticles/10