Abstract Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF) is a key soil functional group, with an important potential to increase crop productivity and sustainable agriculture including food security. However, there is clear evidence that land uses, crop rotations and soil features affect the AMF diversity and their community functioning in many agroecosystems. So far, the information related to AMF biodiversity in ecosystems like the Argentine Puna, an arid-high plateau where plants experience high abiotic-stresses, are still scarce. In this work, we investigated morphological and molecular AMF diversity in soils of native corn, bean, and native potato Andean crops, under a familiar land use, in the Chaupi Rodeo (Jujuy, Argentina), without agrochemicals supplements but with different histories of crops rotation. Our results showed that AMF morphological diversity not only was high and variable among the three different crop soils but was also complemented by Illumina MiSeq data. The multivariate analyses highlighted that total fungal diversity is significantly affected by the preceding crop plants and the rotation histories, more than from the present crop species, while AMF communities are significantly affected by preceding crop only in combination with the effect of nitrogen and calcium soil concentration. This knowledge will give useful information on appropriate familiar farming.

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The driest part of the Argentinean pampas is occupied by semiarid woodlands dominates by (calden) Prosopis caldenia Burkart. Calden pods are a highly valuable fodder supplement for livestock but its production is highly variable. Our objective was to analyze and model the temporal pattern in inter-annual variability of calden pod production. Our key hypothesis was that weather conditions were the main determinant of the pod masting behaviour. The tree size and climatic variables were evaluated as explanatory covariates. Given the data structure, a Zero-Inflated Log-Normal mixture distribution was evaluated and fitted incorporating random components to carry out with the observed lack of independence. The proposed final model structure incorporated 25 parameters, including four variance components, two intercepts for both the logistic and the log-normal parts of the model and nineteen parameters associated with fixed effects. Climate has strong influence on the flowering-fruiting calden process and on the inter-annual variability of the final pod production at tree level. Temperatures during bud breaking, flowering and fruit shedding, together with the precipitation from the final month of fruit shedding and the total amount of the prior vegetative cycle, are the main weather covariates that affect the processes.