Abstract
Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal communities are now known to vary with depth in arable land. Here we use two previously published high-throughput Illumina sequencing data sets, and compare a 52 year long chronosequence of recultivated agriculture fields after a topsoil and subsoil mixing event, with a set of undisturbed topsoil and subsoil samples from a similar field. We show that AM fungal taxa identified as subsoil indicators are exclusively present in early stages of the chronosequence, whereas topsoil indicator taxa can be found across the chronosequence. Also, community-level similarities from the chronosequence fields to the subsoil decrease with time. Our results provide evidence of ecological specialization of certain AM fungal taxa to deep soil layers.
Highlights
Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi belong to the monophyletic subphylum Glomeromycotina (Spatafora et al, 2016) and form a symbiotic relationship with most land plants (Brundrett and Tedersoo, 2018)
After taxonomic assignment and normalization, we identified a total of 136 AM fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs)
We show that (i) AM fungal taxa identified as subsoil indicators are present only in young fields (1–3 year since the mixing event), while taxa identified as topsoil indicators are present across the entire chronosequence and (ii) early mixed communities from the chronosequence resembled to some extent unmixed subsoil communities and this similarity decreased with time after the mixing event
Summary
Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi belong to the monophyletic subphylum Glomeromycotina (Spatafora et al, 2016) and form a symbiotic relationship with most land plants (Brundrett and Tedersoo, 2018). Subsoil (i.e., beneath the plow layer) AM fungal communities, differ from those in topsoil in diversity, species composition and community structure (Oehl et al, 2005; Muleta et al, 2008; Yang et al, 2010) and even exhibit contrasting patterns of distribution at higher taxonomic levels (Sosa-Hernández et al, 2018). We hypothesize that these differences are caused by Grinellian ecological specialization (Devictor et al, 2010), i.e., top- and sub-soil represent two different environments to which particular AM taxa have adapted. We assume that directly after conversion AM fungal communities from different depths experience a community coalescence event (Rillig et al, 2015), i.e., taxa from different depths are mixed in the newly deposited top layers
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