Unraveling the AM fungal community for understanding its ecosystem resilience to changed climate in agroecosystems

Abstract

The changing global climate affects the agroecosystem making it challenging to achieve the world’s sustainable development goals. Among the facets of belowground microbial communities, the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) hold an important place. They represent the most common symbiont phylum colonizing more than 80% of the plant families and are likely to be affected by global climate change. These fungi facilitate plant’s mineral acquisition, improving growth and protecting them from biotic and abiotic stresses. The elevated carbon dioxide (eCO2) level, temperature, increased nitrogen and phosphorus deposition influences the plant phenology and AMF functioning through changes in diversity and community composition of AMF. The interaction effects of soil management practices due to climate change affect the system productivity and perturb mineral cycling. Understanding the carbon and nitrogen cycling of an agro-ecosystem and its associated AMF communities concerning ecosystem productivity is the need of the hour. Plant-fungal associations require a more environment resilient approach to ameliorate the effect of anthropogenic changes in carbon and nitrogen cycles. Since AMF communities alter due to local environmental conditions and land-use changes, the most adapted community may help in predicting the mycorrhizal responses to chemical fertilizers, eCO2, temperature and drought. In this review, we aimed at investigating (i) the diversity and community composition of AMF in relation to the change in crop and soil management practices, and (ii) how the adapted AMF communities may perform in maintaining the ecosystem resilience of these agroecosystems under climate change conditions. Hence, AMF-plant symbiosis can be effectively integrated into global climate change models. Eventually, the ecosystem resilience will be better understood to exploit the resident AMF communities to offset some of the detrimental effects of anthropogenic environmental change.