Environmental filtering affects soil fungal community composition more than dispersal limitation at regional scales

By S. Kivlin, G. Winston, Michael L. Goulden, K. Treseder. 2014

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The relative importance of dispersal limitation versus environmental filtering for community assembly has received much attention for macroorganisms. These processes have only recently been examined in microbial communities. Instead, microbial dispersal has mostly been measured as community composition change over space (i.e., distance decay). Here we directly examined fungal composition in airborne wind currents and soil fungal communities across a 40 000 km2 regional landscape to determine if dispersal limitation or abiotic factors were structuring soil fungal communities. Over this landscape, neither airborne nor soil fungal communities exhibited compositional differences due to geographic distance. Airborne fungal communities shifted temporally while soil fungal communities were correlated with abiotic parameters. These patterns suggest that environmental filtering may have the largest influence on fungal regional community assembly in soils, especially for aerially dispersed fungal taxa. Furthermore, we found evidence that dispersal of fungal spores differs between fungal taxa and can be both a stochastic and deterministic process. The spatial range of soil fungal taxa was correlated with their average regional abundance across all sites, which may imply stochastic dispersal mechanisms. Nevertheless, spore volume was also negatively correlated with spatial range for some species. Smaller volume spores may be adapted to long-range dispersal, or establishment, suggesting that deterministic fungal traits may also influence fungal distributions. Fungal life-history traits may influence their distributions as well. Hypogeous fungal taxa exhibited high local abundance, but small spatial ranges, while epigeous fungal taxa had lower local abundance, but larger spatial ranges. This study is the first, to our knowledge, to directly sample air dispersal and soil fungal communities simultaneously across a regional landscape. We provide some of the first evidence that soil fungal communities are mostly assembled through environmental filtering and experience little dispersal limitation.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3937d324de0635deaf74b63fcc02a36aaeccbdb1

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Citations in the corpus

Fungal community homogenization, shift in dominant trophic guild, and appearance of novel taxa with biotic invasion (2017, background): “At regional scales, soil fungal communities are largely assembled through environmental filtering (Lekberg et al. 2007, Kivlin et al. 2014), with community convergence occurring where environmental conditions are relatively homogenous (Caruso et al. 2012).”
Soil carbon content drives the biogeographical distribution of fungal communities in the black soil zone of northeast China (2015, background): “, 2012), although less attention has been directed towards analyzing the relative effects of contemporary and historical factors on the biogeographical distribution of fungal communities (Wu et al., 2013; Kivlin et al., 2014).”
Forest microbiome: diversity, complexity and dynamics. (2016, background): “Microbial biomass content is relatively low (Table 1), but transport seems to be very efficient; environmental filtering has been demonstrated to be a much more important barrier for fungal establishment than dispersal (Kivlin et al. 2014).”
What drives study‐dependent differences in distance–decay relationships of microbial communities? (2021, background): “Many studies have detected little or no evidence of distance– decay relationships in microbial communities (Hazard et al., 2013; Kivlin et al., 2014), whereas others have reported relationships of varying strengths, across a range of spatial extents, study systems and taxa (Clark et al., 2017;…”