Abundant fungi adapt to broader environmental gradients than rare fungi in agricultural fields.

Abstract

Soil communities are intricately linked to ecosystem functioning, and a predictive understanding of how communities assemble in response to environmental change is of great ecological importance. Little is known about the assembly processes governing abundant and rare fungal communities across agro-ecosystems, particularly with regard to their environmental adaptation. By considering abundant and rare taxa, we tested the environmental thresholds and phylogenetic signals for ecological preferences of fungal communities across complex environmental gradients to reflect their environmental adaptation, and explored the factors influencing their assembly based on the large-scale soil survey in agricultural fields across eastern China. We found that the abundant taxa exhibited remarkably broader response thresholds and stronger phylogenetic signals for the ecological preferences across environmental gradients compared to the rare taxa. Neutral processes played a key role in shaping the abundant subcommunity compared to the rare subcommunity. Null model analysis revealed that the abundant subcommunity was less clustered phylogenetically and governed primarily by dispersal limitation, while homogeneous selection was the major assembly process in the rare subcommunity. Soil available sulfur was the major factor mediating the balance between stochastic and deterministic processes of both the abundant and rare subcommunities, as indicated by an increase in stochasticity with higher available sulfur concentration. Based on macroecological spatial scale datasets, our study revealed the potential broader environmental adaptation of abundant fungal taxa compared to rare fungal taxa, and identified the factors mediating their distinct community assembly processes in agricultural fields. These results contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the generation and maintenance of fungal diversity in response to global environmental change.