Fungal Taxa Target Different Carbon Sources in Forest Soil

By China A. Hanson, S. Allison, M. Bradford, M. Wallenstein, K. Treseder. Ecosystems, 2008

214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soil microbes are among the most abundant and diverse organisms on Earth. Although microbial decomposers, particularly fungi, are important mediators of global carbon and nutrient cycling, the functional roles of specific taxa within natural environments remain unclear. We used a nucleotide-analog technique in soils from the Harvard Forest to characterize the fungal taxa that responded to the addition of five different carbon substrates—glycine, sucrose, cellulose, lignin, and tannin-protein. We show that fungal community structure and richness shift in response to different carbon sources, and we demonstrate that particular fungal taxa target different organic compounds within soil microcosms. Specifically, we identified eleven taxa that exhibited changes in relative abundances across substrate treatments. These results imply that niche partitioning through specialized resource use may be an important mechanism by which soil microbial diversity is maintained in ecosystems. Consequently, high microbial diversity may be necessary to sustain ecosystem processes and stability under global change.

Subfields: Ecology, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e367832e6a89c385019f1f40357bcfc933af233

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Insect Science

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Microbial control over carbon cycling in soil (2012, background): “Some organisms specialize on particular substrates; for example, fungi that grow best on sucrose vs. cellulose vs. lignin vs. tannin–protein complexes (Hanson et al., 2008).”
Multiple mechanisms for trait effects on litter decomposition: moving beyond home‐field advantage with a new hypothesis (2012, background): “…difference between decomposer communities with respect to their efficiency to acquire non-recalcitrant resources (Waldrop, Balser & Firestone 2000; Hanson et al. 2008), our results could imply a trade-off in decomposer communities between those more efficient in degrading recalcitrant tissues…”
Low levels of nitrogen addition stimulate decomposition by boreal forest fungi (2009, background): “These results are consistent with a recent DNA labeling study which showed that different fungi target different C substrates in Harvard Forest soils (Hanson et al., 2008).”
Linking deadwood traits with saproxylic invertebrates and fungi in European forests - a review (2018, background): “Another study conducted by Hanson et al. (2008) provided evidence for resource partitioning among soil fungi within a laboratory setting, emphasizing the need to prove the same process within natural ecosystems.”
Laccases: toward disentangling their diversity and functions in relation to soil organic matter cycling (2010, background): “…the ecosystem type and hence the level of substrate recalcitrance (Blackwood et al. 2007), increased N deposition (Hofmockel et al. 2007), or the interaction between the ecosystem stand and manipulated N deposition (Hassett et al. 2008) can significantly affect the laccase-encoding gene abundance.”
Differential Growth Responses of Soil Bacterial Taxa to Carbon Substrates of Varying Chemical Recalcitrance (2011, methodology): “, 2008) and fungal taxa in temperate (Hanson et al., 2008) and boreal forest soils (Allison et al.”