SUMMARY Understanding the mechanisms controlling community diversity, functions, succession, and biogeography is a central, but poorly understood, topic in ecology, particularly in microbial ecology. Although stochastic processes are believed to play nonnegligible roles in shaping community structure, their importance relative to deterministic processes is hotly debated. The importance of ecological stochasticity in shaping microbial community structure is far less appreciated. Some of the main reasons for such heavy debates are the difficulty in defining stochasticity and the diverse methods used for delineating stochasticity. Here, we provide a critical review and synthesis of data from the most recent studies on stochastic community assembly in microbial ecology. We then describe both stochastic and deterministic components embedded in various ecological processes, including selection, dispersal, diversification, and drift. We also describe different approaches for inferring stochasticity from observational diversity patterns and highlight experimental approaches for delineating ecological stochasticity in microbial communities. In addition, we highlight research challenges, gaps, and future directions for microbial community assembly research.

摘要了解控制群落多样性、功能、演替和生物地理学的机制是生态学，特别是微生物生态学的一个中心主题，但人们对此知之甚少。尽管随机过程被认为在塑造群落结构中发挥着不可忽视的作用，但它们相对于确定性过程的重要性仍存在激烈争论。生态随机性在塑造微生物群落结构中的重要性却远未被认识到。造成如此激烈争论的一些主要原因是定义随机性的困难以及用于描述随机性的不同方法。在这里，我们对微生物生态学中随机群落组装的最新研究数据进行了批判性回顾和综合。然后，我们描述了各种生态过程中嵌入的随机和确定性成分，包括选择、扩散、多样化和漂移。我们还描述了从观测多样性模式推断随机性的不同方法，并重点介绍了描述微生物群落生态随机性的实验方法。此外，我们还强调了微生物群落组装研究的研究挑战、差距和未来方向。