Abstract
Deconvoluting the relative contributions made by specific biotic and abiotic drivers to soil fungal community compositions facilitates predictions about the functional responses of ecosystems to environmental changes, such as losses of plant diversity, but it is hindered by the complex interactions involved. Experimental assembly of tree species allows separation of the respective effects of plant community composition (biotic components) and soil properties (abiotic components), enabling much greater statistical power than can be achieved in observational studies. We therefore analyzed these contributions by assessing, via pyrotag sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS2) rDNA region, fungal communities in young subtropical forest plots included in a large experiment on the effects of tree species richness. Spatial variables and soil properties were the main drivers of soil fungal alpha and beta-diversity, implying strong early-stage environmental filtering and dispersal limitation. Tree related variables, such as tree community composition, significantly affected arbuscular mycorrhizal and pathogen fungal community structure, while differences in tree host species and host abundance affected ectomycorrhizal fungal community composition. At this early stage of the experiment, only a limited amount of carbon inputs (rhizodeposits and leaf litter) was being provided to the ecosystem due to the size of the tree saplings, and persisting legacy effects were observed. We thus expect to find increasing tree related effects on fungal community composition as forest development proceeds.
Highlights
Soil fungi are a highly diverse group of organisms, providing many ecosystem services such as organic matter decomposition, element cycling, plant nutrition and plant protection (van der Heijden et al, 2015)
Substantial amounts of fern-associated arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi presumably persisted in the soil and could have impacted the tree-associated AM fungal community composition that we identified and potential relationships with tree variable effects
We quantitatively assessed the independent contributions made by spatial, abiotic and biotic variables to soil fungal community structure in a study facilitated by the experimental set-up of the tree diversity forest plots that we investigated
Summary
Soil fungi are a highly diverse group of organisms (possibly including several million species; Blackwell, 2011; Taylor et al, 2014), providing many ecosystem services such as organic matter decomposition, element cycling, plant nutrition and plant protection (van der Heijden et al, 2015). They can be assigned to functional guilds based on the primary classes of resources they exploit (Nguyen et al, 2016a), and the composition of their communities is governed by multiple, Fungal Diversity in Experimental Forests strongly interacting abiotic, biotic and spatial variables (Figure 1). Pathogenic fungi can substantially impair plant growth and fecundity (Zeilinger et al, 2016), or even destroy large populations of their hosts, but they play important roles in maintaining plant diversity and mediating plant succession in forest ecosystems (Gilbert, 2002)
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