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Soil fungal networks maintain local dominance of ectomycorrhizal trees

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Article number2636
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>26/05/2020
<mark>Journal</mark>Nature Communications
Issue number1
Volume11
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The mechanisms regulating community composition and local dominance of trees in species-rich forests are poorly resolved, but the importance of interactions with soil microbes is increasingly acknowledged. Here, we show that tree seedlings that interact via root-associated fungal hyphae with soils beneath neighbouring adult trees grow faster and have greater survival than seedlings that are isolated from external fungal mycelia, but these effects are observed for species possessing ectomycorrhizas (ECM) and not arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. Moreover, survival of naturally-regenerating AM seedlings over ten years is negatively related to the density of surrounding conspecific plants, while survival of ECM tree seedlings displays positive density dependence over this interval, and AM seedling roots contain greater abundance of pathogenic fungi than roots of ECM seedlings. Our findings show that neighbourhood interactions mediated by beneficial and pathogenic soil fungi regulate plant demography and community structure in hyperdiverse forests.

Bibliographic note

Funding Information: We are grateful to Weinan Ye, Dr Yinghua Luo, Dr Zongbo Peng, Jie Li, Dr Meng Xu, Fengmin Huang, Wenbin Li, Yongning Li, and also Dr Buhang Li and his field technician team for help with field data collection. We thank Yanwen Chen, Huidan Teng, and Dr Shan Luo for assistance in the field experiments. We acknowledge Dr. Fang Li for kindly providing the featured images of ECM fungi. This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Project No. 2017YFA0605100) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 31770466 to X.L. and 31870403 to M.L.), and partly supported by awards from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC NE/M004848/1 and NE/R004986/1). D.J. is also supported by the N8 AgriFood programme. Publisher Copyright: © 2020, The Author(s). Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved. M1 - 2636