Modeling in microbial ecology
Résumé
The bases and the principles of modeling in microbial community ecology and biogeochemistry are presented and discussed. Several examples are given. Among them, the fermentation process is largely developed, thus demonstrating how the model allows determining the microbial population growth rate, the death rate, and the maintenance rate. More generally, these models have been used to increase the development of bioenergetic formulations which are presently used in biogeochemical models (Monod, Droop, DEB models). Different types of interactions (competition, predation, and virus–bacteria) are also developed. For each topic, a complete view of the models used in the literature cannot be presented. Consequently, the focus has been done on the demonstration how to build a model instead of providing a long list of existing models. Some recent results in sediment biogeochemistry are provided to illustrate the application of such models.