Abstract
Changes in soil fungal communities caused by land use have not been sufficiently studied in South American Andosols, which are considered key food production areas. Since fungal communities play an important role in soil functionality, this study analysed 26 soil samples of Andosols collected from locations devoted to conservation, agriculture and mining activities in Antioquia, Colombia, to establish differences between fungal communities as indicators of soil biodiversity loss using Illumina MiSeq metabarcoding on nuclear ribosomal ITS2 region. A non-metric multidimensional scaling allowed to explore driver factors of changes in fungal communities, while the significance of these variations was assessed by PERMANOVA. Furthermore, the effect size of land use over relevant taxa was quantified. Our results suggest a good coverage of fungal diversity with a detection of 353,312 high-quality ITS2 sequences. We found strong correlations of Shannon and Fisher indexes with dissimilarities on fungal communities (r = 0.94). These correlations allow grouping soil samples according to land use. Variations in temperature, air humidity and organic matter content lead to changes in abundances of relevant orders (Wallemiales and Trichosporonales). The study highlights specific sensitivities of fungal biodiversity features in tropical Andosols, which may serve as a basis for robust assessments of soil quality in the region.
Highlights
Changes in the structure of soil fungal communities are important indicators of variation in soil health caused by land use
Despite the high number of valid sequences, the land use associated with mining activities areas (MEA) presented a lower number of different operational taxonomic units (OTUs)
Rarefaction curves built on the rarefied OTU table suggest that a plateau was reached (Figure S1), indicating that the Illumina metabarcoding approach revealed a good representation of the global fungal composition in every specific activity
Summary
Changes in the structure of soil fungal communities are important indicators of variation in soil health caused by land use. Soil functions, related to nutrient cycling, ecosystem provisioning and climate regulation can decrease due to loss of fungal diversity [1,2]. There is information on the effect of different land uses on tropical soil fungal communities [3–5], the distribution of fungal taxa, functional groups and biogeographical patterns, at local scale in Colombian soils, is still poorly and discontinuously analysed [6]. Information is lacking in understanding how human activities affect the diversity and structure of fungal communities in Colombian Andosols. The assessment of local soil fungal communities, whose composition depends on the characteristics of the bioclimatic region and the specific conditions of each site, is the basis of studies on their ecological behaviour [8]. The identification of fungal taxa associated with soils is necessary for understanding these
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