The composition of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities in the roots of a ruderal forb is not related to the forest fragmentation process

GRILLI GABRIEL; URCELAY CARLOS; GALETTO LEONARDO; DAVISON JOHN; VASAR MARTTI; SAKS ÜLLE ; JAIRUS TEELE; ÖPIK MAARJA

ENVIRONMENTAL MICROBIOLOGY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2015 vol. 17 p. 2709 - 2720

1462-2912

Land-use changes and forest fragmentation have strong impact on biodiversity. However, little is known about the influence of new landscape configurations on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) community composition. We used 454-pyrosequencing to assess AMF diversity in plant roots from a fragmented forest. We detected fifty-nine virtual taxa of AMF (VT; phylogenetically-defined OTUs)?including ten new VT?in the roots of Euphorbia acerensis. AMF communities were mainly composed of members of family Glomeraceae and were similar throughout the fragmented landscape, despite variation in forest fragment size (i.e. small, medium and large) and isolation (i.e. varying pairwise distances). AMF communities in forest fragments were phylogenetically clustered compared to the global, but not regional and local AMF taxon pools. This indicates that non-random community assembly processes possibly related to dispersal limitation at a large scale, rather than habitat filtering or biotic interactions, may be important in structuring the AMF communities. In this system, forest fragmentation did not appear to influence AMF community composition in the roots of the ruderal plant. Whether this is true for AMF communities in soil and the roots of other ecological groups of host plants or in other habitats deserves further study.