Resistant ammonia-oxidizing archaea endure, but adapting ammonia-oxidizing bacteria thrive in boreal lake sediments receiving nutrient-rich effluents.

Summary Climate change along with anthropogenic activities changes biogeochemical conditions in lake ecosystems, modifying the sediment microbial communities. Wastewater effluents introduce nutrients and organic material but also novel microbes to lake ecosystems, simulating forthcoming increases in catchment loadings. In this work, we first used 16s rRNA gene sequencing to study how the overall sediment microbial community responds to wastewater in six boreal lakes. To examine forthcoming changes in the lake biogeochemistry, we focused on the ammonia‐oxidizing archaea (AOA) and bacteria (AOB), and examined their functional and compositional community response to wastewater. Although we fou…