Taxonomic resolution is a determinant of biodiversity effects in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities

Abstract

Summary1. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are key regulators of ecosystem processes, yet how their biodiversity works in ecosystems remains poorly understood. 2. We documented the extent to which taxonomic resolution influenced the effect of biodiversity of AMF taxa on plant performance (growth, nutrient uptake and stress tolerance) in a meta-analysis of 902 articles. 3. We found that the effect of biodiversity of AMF taxa depended on taxonomic resolution. Plant performance was positively promoted by AMF family richness, while no effect was found for fungal species richness. In addition, negative effect was found between AMF phylogenetic diversity and plant growth. This pattern can be explained by functional conservatism within AMF families and functional differentiation among AMF families. 4. Synthesis. Conservation of AMF communities to maintain a full complement of ecosystem functions requires the presence of diverse families and not simply diverse species within a family. This finding may be of key importance for the function of ecosystems under various environmental perturbations to which AMF families may respond differently.

Contrasting effects of host identity, plant community, and local species pool on the composition and colonization levels of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal community in a temperate grassland

“…Further, the effect of host functional group remained important when we switched to examining the AMF community data aggregated into fungal families. There are multiple cases of evidence in the literature that the higher taxonomic levels of the Glomeromycota phylum possess signals of varying functionality: efficiency in providing soil P (Yang et al ., ), relative investment into extramatrical mycelium compared with biomass within host roots (Maherali & Klironomos, ), and sensitivity to disturbances (König et al ., ) or to heavy metals (He et al ., ). In the grassland studied here, the dicotyledonous hosts supported a larger diversity of AMF families, with only taxa from the Claroideoglomeraceae family being more frequent in grass roots.…”

“…Soil N availability has often been reported as a driving factor of AMF community composition (Egerton-Warburton et al, 2007;Fitzsimons et al, 2008;Antoninka et al, 2011;Camenzind et al, 2014), and the variation in soil moisture can similarly select AMF taxa more supportive to plants under drought conditions (Yang et al, 2017). The dominating impact of soil properties on the identity and abundance of AMFs has been widely reported in literature (Bouffaud et al, 2016;Dassen et al, 2017;Van Geel et al, 2018).…”

Biodiversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and ecosystem function

“…Therefore, it is premature to suggest that phylogenetic diversity on its own is a useful predictor of any aspect of ecosystem functioning in real environments. That said, Yang et al (2017), in a meta-analysis of pot experiments involving inoculation with a variety of species of AM fungi, provided additional evidence that different aspects of mycorrhizal function are conserved within clades of AM fungi. In their case, phosphorus uptake was observed to be greater in the presence of species from the Glomeraceae, which is inconsistent with the observations of Maherali & Klironomos (2007).…”

“…There are fundamentally different avenues one can take to tackle the role of AM fungal biodiversity in ecosystem functions and, ideally, these can be combined to generate mechanistic insight. First, one can characterize and compare the effects mediated by different species, learning about the traits responsible for such effects (Sikes et al, 2010;Yang et al, 2017) and supporting the development of mechanistic hypotheses regarding how biodiversity facilitates function. Second, one can co-inoculate with combinations of different AM fungal isolates to study the effects of increasing diversity.…”

Does genotypic and species diversity of mycorrhizal plants and fungi affect ecosystem function?

“…Tansley insight New Phytologist suggests that maintaining AM fungi from diverse families rather than species diversity within families is more important for plant performance (Yang et al, 2017). However, this conclusion is only based on the analysis of a single ecosystem function, and a greater amount of genotypic and species diversity of mycorrhizal fungi may be required to support multiple ecosystem functions across temporal and environmental change.…”