Climate and land cover shape the fungal community structure in topsoil

Abstract

Globally, soils are subject to radical changes in their biogeochemistry as rampant deforestation and other forms of land use and climate change continue to transform planet Earth. To better understand soil ecosystem functioning, it is necessary to understand the responses of soil microbial diversity and community structure to changing climate, land cover, and associated environmental variables. With next-generation sequencing, we investigated changes in topsoil fungi community structure among different land cover types (from Forest to Cropland) and climate zones (from Hot to Cold zones) in the Western Pacific Region. We demonstrated that climate zones substantially (P = 0.001) altered the soil fungal beta-diversity (change in community composition), but not alpha-diversity (taxonomical diversity). In particular, precipitation, temperature, and also latitude were the best predictors of beta-diversity. Individual fungal classes displayed divergent but strong responses to climate variables and latitude, suggesting niche differentiation at lower taxonomic levels. We also demonstrated that fungal taxonomic diversity differentially responded to latitude across land covers: fungal diversity increased towards lower latitudes in the Forest and Cropland (R2 = 0.19) but increased towards both lower and higher latitudes in Fallow land (R2 = 0.45). Further, alpha-diversity was significantly influenced by soil pH in Forest (P = 0.02), and by diurnal temperature range in Fallow land and mean annual precipitation in Cropland. Collectively, various land cover types had differential influence on the latitude diversity gradient, while climate, and to some extent, edaphic variables, were crucial in shaping soil fungal community structure. Our results can also serve as a baseline for estimating global change impacts on fungal community structure in the Western Pacific Region.