How Do N Addition Affect Soil Fungal Community Assembly: Short- Versus Long-term Effects?

Abstract

Background: Soil fungi play critical roles in ecosystem processes and are sensitive to global changes. Elevated atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition has been well documented to impact on fungal diversity and community composition, but how fungal community assembly respond to short- and long-term simulative N deposition remains poorly understood. Here, we carried out two field experiments to investigate the soil fungal community variations and assembly processes under short- (2 years) versus long-term (13 years) exogenous nitrogen addition (100 kg N ha-1 yr-1) in a N-rich tropical forest of China. Results: We observed that short-term N addition significantly increased fungal taxonomic and phylogenetic α-diversity, and shifted fungal community composition with significant increases in the relative abundance of Ascomycota and saprotrophic fungi, and decreases in the relative abundance of Basidiomycota and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi. However, unremarkable effects were found under long-term N addition. The variations of fungal α-diversity, community composition, the relative abundance of major phyla, genera and functional guilds were mainly correlated with soil pH and the concentrations of NO3--N, and these correlations were much stronger under short- than long-term N addition. The results of null, neutral community models and the 39 normalized stochasticity ratio (NST) index consistently revealed that stochastic processes played predominant roles in the assembly of soil fungal community under N addition in the tropical forest, and that the relative contributions of stochastic processes were higher at short-term site. Furthermore, both short- and long-term N addition slightly loosened the co-occurrence networks of the fungal community. Conclusions: These findings highlighted that the responses of fungal community structure to N addition were duration-dependent, i.e., the fungal community was sensitive to the short-term N addition but become acclimatized to long-term N enrichment.