Journal article
Plant community, geographic distance and abiotic factors play different roles in predicting AMF biogeography at the regional scale in northern China
T Xu, SD Veresoglou, Y Chen, MC Rillig, D Xiang, D Ondřej, Z Hao, L Liu, Y Deng, Y Hu, W Chen, J Wang, J He, B Chen
Environmental Microbiology Reports | WILEY | Published : 2016
Abstract
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are ubiquitous mutualists of terrestrial plants and play key roles in regulating various ecosystem processes, but little is known about AMF biogeography at regional scale. This study aims at exploring the key predictors of AMF communities across a 5000-km transect in northern China. We determined the soil AMF species richness and community composition at 47 sites representative of four vegetation types (meadow steppe, typical steppe, desert steppe and desert) and related them to plant community characteristics, abiotic factors and geographic distance. The results showed that soil pH was the strongest predictor of AMF richness and phylogenetic diversity. How..
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Awarded by National Natural Science Foundation of China
Funding Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Mr Shunli YU, Qiang Yuan, Baojing Zheng, Libao Zheng, Peng Han, Miss Yuqing Sun and Shiji Hou for their assistance in the field sampling. This research was supported by National key research and development program, China (2016YFC0500702), a Joint Project of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, P.R. China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (STSN-21-04) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (41371264; 41071178). The manuscript has been viewed and approved by all the co-authors, and we declare no conflict of interest.