Atmospheric rivers deliver Patagonian bioaerosol to the Antarctic Peninsula — Walkthrough

ecastron@utalca.cl (Eduardo Castro) — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We released a self-contained walkthrough of the LRT (Long-Range Transport) study, describing 16S/ITS results from a 1,500 km Patagonia → Antarctic Peninsula transect (austral summer 2022, 193 samples) and how they line up with co-incident atmospheric-river evidence on 2022-02-07/08.

Read it here: Atmospheric rivers deliver Patagonian bioaerosol to the Antarctic Peninsula

Highlights

Weighted-UniFrac PCoA places Antarctic air in a distinct region of community space relative to the Malard et al. 2022 Southern Ocean air reference, with a continuous latitudinal axis recapitulated in the LRT air-only ordination.
Pre-AR Antarctic Air is strongly phylogenetically clustered (NRI ≈ +10); during the AR window NRI collapses toward 0, Faith’s PD jumps ~2.5×, and βNTI shifts from a homogeneous-selection to a stochastic regime — the AR releases the receptor community from its low-biomass selection filter.
Three independent windows on the same event — on-site wind roses, ERA5 IVT + Z500, and CHIMERE pISOPA1 (terrestrial-vegetation isoprene-oxidation SOA) — converge on a textbook Patagonia → Peninsula corridor.
A parallel ITS-based fungal signal (Supplementary Figure S1) tracks the bacterial response.
Headline results are robust to decontamination following the Fierer et al. 2025 low-biomass guidelines (decontam, prevalence method, buffer-control reference); 0 of 168 representative AR-arrival ASVs are flagged.

The page is fully self-contained (no external CDNs) and bundles all five main figures plus one supplementary figure.

ITS on Castro Lab

Atmospheric rivers deliver Patagonian bioaerosol to the Antarctic Peninsula — Walkthrough