Belowground fungal community diversity and composition associated with Norway spruce along an altitudinal gradient

Abstract

Altitudinal gradients provide valuable information about the effects of environmental variables on changes in species richness and composition as well as the distribution of below ground fungal communities. Since most knowledge in this respect has been gathered on aboveground communities, we focused our study towards the characterization of belowground fungal communities associated with two different ages of Norway spruce (Picea abies) trees along an altitudinal gradient. By sequencing the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region on the Illumina platform, we investigated the fungal communities in a floristically and geologically relatively well explored forest on the slope of Mt. Iseler of the Bavarian Alps. From fine roots and rhizosphere of a total of 90 of Norway spruce trees from 18 plots we detected 1285 taxa, with a range of 167 to 506 (average 377) taxa per plot. Fungal taxa are distributed over 96 different orders belonging to the phyla Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Chrytridiomycota, Glomeromycota, and Mucoromycota. Overall the Agaricales (438 taxa) and Tremellales (81 taxa) belonging to the Basidiomycota and the Hypocreales (65 spp.) and Helotiales (61 taxa) belonging to the Ascomycota represented the taxon richest orders. The evaluation of our multivariate generalized mixed models indicate that the altitude has a significant influence on the composition of the fungal communities (p < 0.003) and that tree age determines community diversity (p < 0.05). A total of 47 ecological guilds were detected, of which the ectomycorrhizal and saprophytic guilds were the most taxon-rich. Our ITS amplicon Illumina sequencing approach allowed us to characterize a high fungal community diversity that would not be possible to capture with fruiting body surveys alone. We conclude that it is an invaluable tool for diverse monitoring tasks and inventorying biodiversity, especially in the detection of microorganisms developing very ephemeral and/or inconspicuous fruiting bodies or lacking them all together. Results suggest that the altitude mainly influences the community composition, whereas fungal diversity becomes higher in mature/older trees. Finally, we demonstrate that novel techniques from bacterial microbiome analyses are also useful for studying fungal diversity and community structure in a DNA metabarcoding approach, but that incomplete reference sequence databases so far limit effective identification.

Large-Scale Characterization of the Soil Microbiome in Ancient Tea Plantations Using High-Throughput 16S rRNA and Internal Transcribed Spacer Amplicon Sequencing

“…The AMF species composition was different at extreme elevations and similar in intermediate zones, suggesting that the distribution of the species along different attitudes may be governed by soil variability (Coutinho et al, 2015). Similarly, altitude had a significant effect on the composition of the soil fungal communities associated with Norway spruce (Picea abies), whereas the age of the tree governs community diversity (Schön et al, 2018). Besides, altitude significantly impacts the relative abundances of the dominant phyla and classes of soil fungi and the interface of altitude and season affects the relative abundances of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota (Ji et al, 2021).…”

Investigation of an Elevational Gradient Reveals Strong Differences Between Bacterial and Eukaryotic Communities Coinhabiting Nepenthes Phytotelmata

“…Microbes have not been as extensively studied in the context of elevational gradients, but the past decade has seen an increasing number of studies examining elevational patterns of bacteria in soil [6,[8][9][10][11][12][20][21][22] and to a lesser extent, aquatic habitats [23][24][25][26]. Similar studies have also been conducted for fungi [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] and protists [18,[36][37][38][39]. Of these microbial elevational gradient studies, only a handful have compared diversity patterns of syntopic microbes and macrobes coinhabiting the same microhabitats.…”

Changes in landscape ecology between nature reserve and palm oil plantation in West Java, Indonesia based on the observations of macrofungal population

“…The diversity indices used were Shannon-Wiener index (H'), Gini-Simpson index (1-D), the effective number of species from H', community dominance index used Berger-Parker dominance, and Rényi entropy for relative measures of community diversity and evenness (Tóthmérész 1995;Jost 2006;Maurer and McGill 2010;Leinster and Cobbold 2012;Morris et al 2014;Mbenoun et al 2017;dos Santos et al 2020;Nur 'Aqilah et al 2020). Species accumulation curves were generated by collector and random methods with 1000 permutations (Schön et al 2018;Atrena et al 2020;Kärvemo et al 2021). The analysis of the macrofungal species distribution was done by Venn diagram (López-Quintero et al 2012;O'Hanlon et al 2013;Brunner et al 2014;Ghate et al 2014;Wei et al 2019;Ye et al 2019;Runnel et al 2021).…”