Abstract
Author(s): Wang, P; Chen, Y; Sun, Y; Tan, S; Zhang, S; Wang, Z; Zhou, J; Zhang, G; Shu, W; Luo, C; Kuang, J | Abstract: Plant pathogens are increasingly considered as important agents in promoting plant coexistence, while plant symbionts like ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) can facilitate plant dominance by helping conspecific individuals to defend against plant pathogens. However, we know little about their relationships with plants at large scales. Here, using soil fungal data collected from 28 forest reserves across China, we explored the latitudinal diversity gradients of overall fungi and different fungal functional guilds, including putative plant pathogens, EMF, and saprotrophic fungi. We further linked the spatial patterns of alpha diversities of putative plant pathogens and EMF to the variation of plant species richness. We found that the relationships between latitude and alpha diversities of putative plant pathogens and EMF were region-dependent with sharp diversity shifts around the mid-latitude (~35°N), which differed from the unimodal diversity distributions of the overall and saprotrophic fungi. The variations in the diversities of putative plant pathogens and EMF were largely explained by the spatial regions (south vs. north/subtropical zone vs. temperate zone). Additionally, the alpha diversities of these two fungal guilds exhibited opposing trends across latitude. EMF could alter the relationship between diversities of putative plant pathogens and plants in the south/subtropical region, but not vice versa. We also found that the ratio of their alpha diversities (EMF to putative plant pathogens) was negatively related to plant species richness across the spatial regions (north to south), and explained ~10% of the variation of plant species richness. Overall, our findings suggest that plant-microbe interactions not only shape the local plant diversity but also may have non-negligible contributions to the large-scale patterns of plant diversity in forest ecosystems.
Highlights
The increase in species richness from polar to equatorial regions is well known for plant communities (Kier et al, 2005; Kreft and Jetz, 2007; Qian and Ricklefs, 2008; Wang et al, 2012)
We examined the changes of community compositions of overall fungi and different fungal guilds across latitude by calculating the relative abundances at phylum level and genus level, respectively (Figure S1)
We identified three species (Fusarium solani; Fusarium langsethiae; Fusarium oxysporum) with affinity to Fusarium (Table S2)
Summary
The increase in species richness from polar to equatorial regions is well known for plant communities (Kier et al, 2005; Kreft and Jetz, 2007; Qian and Ricklefs, 2008; Wang et al, 2012) This latitudinal gradient of biodiversity has attracted a great interest from ecologists (Willig et al, 2003), which is one of the most general patterns for different types of organisms on the earth (Helmut, 2004). The Janzen-Connell hypothesis (Janzen, 1970; Connell, 1971) has been widely recognized as one of the central forces organizing plant communities It assumes that the recruitment of hostspecific natural enemies, such as plant fungal pathogens, can help to maintain plant diversity in forest ecosystems (Mangan et al, 2010; Comita et al, 2014; Liu et al, 2015; LaManna et al, 2016, 2017). A comprehensive study linking the spatial distributions of different fungal functional guilds (e.g., EMF and plant pathogens) to plant diversity across latitude is urgently needed
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