Large‐scale fungal diversity assessment in the Andean Yungas forests reveals strong community turnover among forest types along an altitudinal gradient

Abstract

The Yungas, a system of tropical and subtropical montane forests on the eastern slopes of the Andes, are extremely diverse and severely threatened by anthropogenic pressure and climate change. Previous mycological works focused on macrofungi (e.g. agarics, polypores) and mycorrhizae in Alnus acuminata forests, while fungal diversity in other parts of the Yungas has remained mostly unexplored. We carried out Ion Torrent sequencing of ITS2 rDNA from soil samples taken at 24 sites along the entire latitudinal extent of the Yungas in Argentina. The sampled sites represent the three altitudinal forest types: the piedmont (400-700 m a.s.l.), montane (700-1500 m a.s.l.) and montane cloud (1500-3000 m a.s.l.) forests. The deep sequence data presented here (i.e. 4 108 126 quality-filtered sequences) indicate that fungal community composition correlates most strongly with elevation, with many fungi showing preference for a certain altitudinal forest type. For example, ectomycorrhizal and root endophytic fungi were most diverse in the montane cloud forests, particularly at sites dominated by Alnus acuminata, while the diversity values of various saprobic groups were highest at lower elevations. Despite the strong altitudinal community turnover, fungal diversity was comparable across the different zonal forest types. Besides elevation, soil pH, N, P, and organic matter contents correlated with fungal community structure as well, although most of these variables were co-correlated with elevation. Our data provide an unprecedented insight into the high diversity and spatial distribution of fungi in the Yungas forests.

Soil Biology Research across Latitude, Elevation and Disturbance Gradients: A Review of Forest Studies from Puerto Rico during the Past 25 Years

“…Similar patterns have been observed along elevation gradients in Borneo, Mexico and Peru [52,53,70]. The turnover of protists (bacteria and Chrenarecheaota) between adjacent forest types was not as strong as the turnover in soil fungi, but the two highest elevation forests had species unique to this zone [5].…”

“…High turnover in microbial species assemblages along an elevation gradient in eastern Puerto Rico [5] resembles patterns found on mountains in Malaysia, Mexico and Peru where high turnover of plant and fungal assemblages along elevation gradients are also found [52][53][54][55]. The study of phylogenetic origins of endemic species of plants, animals and fungi on a young mountain in Malaysia by Merckx et al [52] showed strong niche conservatism that results in high species turnover along the elevation gradient [55,56].…”

Soil pH determines the alpha diversity but not beta diversity of soil fungal community along altitude in a typical Tibetan forest ecosystem

“…Richness pattern of fungi evaluated through the operational taxonomic unit (OTU) counts across individual community demonstrated a species-area relationship along the altitudinal gradient of the Alps (Pellissier et al 2014). Phylodiversity and evenness pattern demonstrated the fungal variance across altitudinal forest types in the Andes (Geml et al 2014). The latter reflects the shifts of community composition triggered the turnover of fungi (beta diversity) along altitude (Geml et al 2014).…”

Who lives in our dishwasher? Preliminar results of fungal metagenomic analysis of household dishwashers

“…In a few previous studies, Ion Torrent technology was already used to identify fungal communities from different sources (Kemler et al, 2013;Brown et al, 2013;Tonge et al, 2014;Geml et al, 2014), but here we present the first report of the NGS metagenomic approach for analysis of fungal populations in the samples from four different dishwashers. Identification was based on NGS of the D2 LSU rRNA amplicon and it revealed rich, but also diverse fungal communities present in our dishwashers.…”