Abstract
Forests on steep slopes constitute a significant proportion of European mountain areas and are important as production and protection forests. This study describes the soil fungal community structure in a European beech-dominated mountain forest stands in the Northern Calcareous Alps and investigates how it is determined by season and soil properties. Samples were collected at high spatial resolution in an area of ca. 100 m × 700 m in May (spring) and August (summer). Illumina MiSeq high-throughput sequencing of the ITS2-region revealed distinct patterns for the soil fungal communities. In contrast to other studies from temperate European beech forest stands, Ascomycota dominated the highly diverse fungal community, while ectomycorrhizal fungi were of lower abundance. Russulaceae, which are often among the dominant ectomycorrhizal fungi associated with European beech, were absent from all samples. Potentially plant pathogenic fungi were more prevalent than previously reported. Only subtle seasonal differences were found between fungal communities in spring and summer. Especially, dominant saprotrophic taxa were largely unaffected by season, while slightly stronger effects were observed for ectomycorrhizal fungi. Soil characteristics like pH and organic carbon content, on the other hand, strongly shaped abundant taxa among the saprotrophic fungal community.
Highlights
40% of European mountain areas are covered by forests [1]
This study describes the soil fungal community structure in a mountain beech forest and investigates how it is determined by plant phenological changes concomitant with season and soil properties
In the studied mountain beech forest, 509 fungal Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) (Online Resource 2, Table S2) were retrieved from 112 soil samples collected in May and August 2015; on average, 231 ±25 OTUs were found per sample (Online Resource 1, Figure S4a)
Summary
The steep slopes and varying topographies of mountain forests result in heterogeneity in microsite and microclimatic conditions, as well as interlocking patterns of different humus and soil types [11]. This causes heterogeneity in ecosystem processes such as N mineralization, nitrification, and N availability [12]. In contrast to vascular plant diversity, which has been studied across all European forest types [15], studies of soil microbial diversity have been carried out mainly on homogeneous low-elevation forests [16,17,18] (but see [10]). The importance of spatial heterogeneity for microbial community composition has been widely recognized [19], it is not fully understood whether observations at large scales apply to standlevels [20], for calcareous mountain forests with high soil spatial heterogeneity [21]
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