Soil properties and geography shape arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities in black land of China

The black land is a precious strategic soil resource in nature. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF, phylum Glomeromycota) have a critical role in the agricultural ecosystem functioning. However, the black land remains largely unexplored. This study adopted MiSeq sequencing to predict the AMF community distribution and di-versities in 41 farmland sites from northeast China's black land. According to findings in this work, all sequences in those 41 soil sites were categorized as one phylum, one class, four orders, eight families, and night genera in the black land of China. Glomus, Paraglomus and Claroideoglomus were the most abundant genera. The diversity of AMF communities was increased with increasing latitude. Moreover, canonical correspondence and pairwise analysis were performed, which suggested that the AMF community structures and diversities were susceptible to latitude, soil organic matter (SOM), soil pH and N. Variance partitioning analysis and Mantel test showed that both soil properties and geographic distance contributed to AMF community structure. It was concluded that the AMF communities showed relatively pronounced diversity at high latitudes, with soil properties and latitude were the important predictors in determining the AMF community structure in the black land of China. Findings in this work shed more lights on the AMF community diversity and distribution and the important factors influencing it at region spatial scale, and suggest that AMF could be used for improving plant growth and sus-tainable agriculture.

Automated summary

The study explored the distribution and diversity of AMF communities in the black land of northeast China, finding that diversity increased with latitude and was influenced by latitude, soil organic matter, soil pH, and nitrogen. Soil properties and geographic distance both played a role in shaping the structure of AMF communities in the region.