A central pursuit of microbial ecology is to accurately describe and explain the shifts in microbial community composition and function that occur in response to environmental changes. This goal requires a thorough understanding of the individual responses of different species and of the processes guiding the assembly of microbial populations similar in their response traits and corresponding functional traits. These research topics are addressed and synthesized in this Highlights, in four studies applying a traitbased framework to assess how environmental change affected the composition and functional performance of bacterioplankton of natural origin in microcosm experiments. The salinity of many aquatic environments is currently changing, due to climate change and anthropogenic activities. The mechanisms by which salinity influences community assembly, functional redundancy and functional genes involved in nitrogen cycle, and how dispersal modifies community outcome are explored in the four studies. Together, the findings of these case studies demonstrate the feasibility of using novel experiments in combination with integrative analyses of 16S rRNA and meta-'omic' data to address ecological questions. This combined approach has the potential to elucidate both the processes contributing to bacterial community assembly and the possible links between the compositional and functional changes that occur under shifting environmental conditions.