Abstract
BackgroundSoil fungi play crucial roles in ecosystem functions. However, how snow cover change associated with winter warming affects soil fungal communities remains unclear in the Tibetan forest.MethodsWe conducted a snow manipulation experiment to explore immediate and legacy effects of snow exclusion on soil fungal community diversity and composition in a spruce forest on the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Soil fungal communities were performed by the high throughput sequencing of gene-fragments.ResultsAscomycota and Basidiomycota were the two dominant fungal phyla and Archaeorhizomyces, Aspergillus and Amanita were the three most common genera across seasons and snow manipulations. Snow exclusion did not affect the diversity and structure of soil fungal community in both snow-covered and snow-free seasons. However, the relative abundance of some fungal communities was different among seasons. Soil fungal groups were correlated with environmental factors (i.e., temperature and moisture) and soil biochemical variables (i.e., ammonium and enzyme).ConclusionsThese results suggest that the season-driven variations had stronger impacts on soil fungal community than short-term snow cover change. Such findings may have important implications for soil microbial processes in Tibetan forests experiencing significant decreases in snowfall.
Highlights
Soil fungi play crucial roles in ecosystem functions
Each library had 11,947 reads and the sequence was clustered into 70–137 Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) (Table S1)
In the deep snow period, the Shannon index was higher compared to the early thawing period and the middle of the growing season (Fig. 1b)
Summary
Soil fungi play crucial roles in ecosystem functions. how snow cover change associated with winter warming affects soil fungal communities remains unclear in the Tibetan forest. The diversity and composition of fungal communities play key roles in soil carbon and nutrient cycling (Cheng et al 2017; Asemaninejad et al 2018). Some studies have shown that snow depth change resulted in an immediate effect on soil fungal community composition in snow-covered winter (Olofsson et al 2011; Barbeito et al 2013; Voříšková et al 2014; Santalahti et al 2016). Snow cover change could lead to carryover effects on soil fungal community composition in snow-free growing season (Buckeridge et al 2013; Wubs et al 2018; Sorensen et al 2020). Exploring the immediate and legacy effects of snow cover change on fungal community is very essential to understand microbe-associated ecological processes in cold soils
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