Journal Article

Soil fungal diversity in natural grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau

Jin-sheng He, Litong Chen, Haiyan Chu, Jonathan M. Adams, Xin Jing, Teng Yang, Yu Shi, Leho Tedersoo

2017

Overview

Previous studies have revealed inconsistent correlations between fungal diversity and plant diversity from local to global scales, and there is a lack of information about the diversity–diversity and productivity–diversity relationships for fungi in alpine regions. Here we investigated the internal relationships between soil fungal diversity, plant diversity and productivity across 60 grassland sites on the Tibetan Plateau, using Illumina sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region for fungal identification. Fungal alpha and beta diversities were best explained by plant alpha and beta diversities, respectively, when accounting for environmental drivers and geographic distance. The best ordinary least squares (OLS) multiple regression models, partial least squares regression (PLSR) and variation partitioning analysis (VPA) indicated that plant richness was positively correlated with fungal richness. However, no correlation between plant richness and fungal richness was evident for fungal functional guilds when analyzed individually. Plant productivity showed a weaker relationship to fungal diversity which was inter-correlated with other factors such as plant diversity, and was thus excluded as a main driver. Our study points to a predominant effect of plant diversity, along with other factors such as carbon: nitrogen (C: N) ratio, soil phosphorus and dissolved organic carbon, on soil fungal richness.

• Publisher: New Phytologist Trust,Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subject: Alpine regions / Biodiversity / Carbon / China / correlation / Dissolved organic carbon / Dissolved organic phosphorus / diversity coupling / Environmental accounting / Fungi / Fungi - genetics / Fungi - physiology / Grassland / Grasslands / Guilds / internal transcribed spacers / least squares / Least squares method / Least-Squares Analysis / Multiple regression models / Nitrogen / organic carbon / Phosphorus / Plant diversity / Plants / primary productivity / Productivity / productivity–diversity relationship / Regression Analysis / Soil / soil fungal diversity / soil fungi / Soil investigations / Soil Microbiology / Soils / species diversity / Tibet / Tibetan Plateau / transcription (genetics) / Valproic acid