Soil chemical properties, rather than landscape context, influence woodland fungal communities along an urban‐rural gradient

Abstract

With the expansion of cities around the world there is a growing interest in the factors that influence biodiversity and ecosystem processes in urban areas. Fungi are exceptionally diverse and play key roles in ecosystem function, yet despite predictions of negative impacts due to urbanization, fungi have been generally overlooked in urban ecological studies. We surveyed fungi in 16 remnant river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis: Myrtaceae) woodlands along a gradient of 4-35 km from the city of Melbourne (south-east Australia). Using both sporocarp surveys and terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP; primer pair ITS1-F-ITS4), we examined relationships between fungal community composition, landscape context (i.e. urbanization) and soil physicochemical properties. Community compositions from sporocarp data were significantly correlated with those from T-RFLP data, largely because of correlations with ectomycorrhizal sporocarps (Spearman rank correlation coefficients r 0.31-0.42) rather than saprotrophic fungi (r 0.18-0.21). Principal components analysis of soil properties and non-metric multidimensional scaling ordinations of fungal community composition showed no clear separation of sites according to urbanization, and there were no significant correlations between fungal community composition and urbanization. However, fungal community composition was significantly correlated with soil chemical properties (r 0.41-0.55).These data suggest that site-scale soil properties, and associated effects of past and current land management activities, were more important in determining fungal community composition than the landscapelevel influences of urbanization.

Urban meadows as an alternative to short mown grassland: effects of composition and height on biodiversity

“…The contrasting responses of bacteria and fungi to conditions at different depths, and the closer association of fungal composition with changes in plant diversity, are consistent with previous findings although the driving factors are still poorly understood, ranging from pH, through nitrogen, to antecedent use (Newbound et al. , Xu et al. , Sarah et al.…”

“…Fungal community composition at 0-10 cm depth responded to plant diversity, and fungi at 11-20 cm depth responded to plant height. The contrasting responses of bacteria and fungi to conditions at different depths, and the closer association of fungal composition with changes in plant diversity, are consistent with previous findings although the driving factors are still poorly understood, ranging from pH, through nitrogen, to antecedent use (Newbound et al 2012, Xu et al 2014, Sarah et al 2015, Yan et al 2016, Hui et al 2017. In our study system, recent antecedent use is uniform across treatments suggesting that divergent effects of plant communities on soil nitrogen may contribute to differences in microbial communities.…”

Changes in Macrofungal Communities Following Forest Conversion into Tree Plantations in Southern Brazil

“…Although we could not distinguish individuals, genetic diversity correlates to number of fruiting bodies (Newbound et al . ).…”

Substantial compositional turnover of fungal communities in an alpine ridge‐to‐snowbed gradient

“…; Newbound et al . ) have reported a strong structuring effect of pH on fungal community composition. How the below ground fungal communities are influenced and possibly structured by processes that give rise to the strong ridge‐to‐snowbed vegetation gradient for plants and lichens is not yet known.…”