Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PROTISTOLOGY
Volume 80, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER GMBH
DOI: 10.1016/j.ejop.2021.125805
Keywords
Airborne microorganisms; Protists; Forest ecosystems; Canopies; Pathogens
Categories
Funding
- Priority Program SPP 1991: Taxon-omics - New Approaches for Discovering and Naming Biodiversity of the German Research Founda-tion (DFG) [1907/19-1, Schl 229/201]
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Through air sample analysis, we found that Cercozoa and Oomycota have rich biodiversity in forests, and their dispersal is not spatially restricted, with plant pathogens even coming from outside the forest.
Cercozoa and Oomycota contain a huge biodiversity and important pathogens of forest trees and other vegetation. We analyzed air dispersal of these protistan phyla with an air sampler near-ground (similar to 2 m) and in tree crowns (similar to 25 m) of three tree species (oak, linden and ash) in a temperate floodplain forest in March (before leafing) and May (after leaf unfolding) 2019 with a cultivation-independent high-throughput metabarcoding approach. We found a high diversity of Cercozoa and Oomycota in air samples with 122 and 81 OTUs, respectively. Especially oomycetes showed a significant difference in community composition between both sampling dates. Differences in community composition between air samples in tree canopies and close to the ground were however negligible, and also tree species identity did not affect communities in air samples, indicating that the distribution of protistan propagules through the air was not spatially restricted in the forest ecosystem. OTUs of plant pathogens, whose host species did not occur in the forest, demonstrate dispersal of propagules from outside the forest biome. Overall, our results lead to a better understanding of the stochastic processes of air dispersal of protists and protistan pathogens, a prerequisite to understand the mechanisms of their community assembly in forest ecosystems. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier GmbH.
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