Micro-Landscape Dependent Changes in Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungal Community Structure

The roots of most plants host diverse assemblages of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which benefit the plant hosts in diverse ways. Even though we understand that such AMF assemblages are non-random, we do not fully appreciate whether and how environmental settings can make them more or less predictable in time and space. Here we present results from three controlled experiments, where we manipulated two environmental parameters, habitat connectance and habitat quality, to address the degree to which plant roots in archipelagos of high connectance and invariable habitats are colonized with (i) less diverse and (ii) easier to predict AMF assemblages. We observed no differences in diversity across our manipulations. We show, however, that mixing habitats and varying connectance render AMF assemblages less predictable, which we could only detect within and not between our experimental units. We also demonstrate that none of our manipulations favoured any specific AMF taxa. We present here evidence that the community structure of AMF is less responsive to spatio-temporal manipulations than root colonization rates which is a facet of the symbiosis which we currently poorly understand.

Automated summary

Through three controlled experiments, researchers found that the environmental settings of habitat connectance and quality can influence the diversity and predictability of AMF fungi in plant roots. Although manipulating environmental parameters did not affect the diversity of AMF assemblages, mixing habitats and varying connectance did make the assemblages less predictable.