Abstract
One hotspot of present community ecology is to uncover the mechanisms of community succession. In this study, two popular concepts, niche‐neutrality dynamic balancing and co‐occurrence network analysis, were integrated to investigate the dispersal dynamics of microbial communities in a freshwater river continuum in subtropical China. Results showed that when habitat conditions were mild and appropriate, such as in the clean upstream river, free of heavy pollution or long‐lasting extreme disturbances, stochastic processes could increase species diversities, and organize communities into relatively loosely linked and stable networks with higher modularity and more modules. However, when conditions became degraded under heavy pollution, the influence of neutrality diminished, and niche‐based selection imposed more constraints on communities and guided the assembling processes in certain directions: depleting species richness, strengthening interspecies connections and breaking boundaries of modules. Consequently, communities became more sensitive to fluctuations so as to deal with the harsh conditions efficiently. Another interesting finding was that, both as keystone taxa of communities, module hubs were mostly neutrally distributed generalists with high abundances, and were beneficial to many related operational taxonomic units. In contrast, connectors were less abundant and their distributions were more subjected to the environments. Therefore, connectors were probably responsible for the information transmission between microbial communities and environments, as well as between different modules, and thus could restrict the dispersal of microbes and guide the direction of community assembly.