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Soil pH determines fungal diversity along an elevation gradient in Southwestern China

Science China Life Sciences volume 61, pages 718–726 (2018)Cite this article

Abstract

Fungi play important roles in ecosystem processes, and the elevational pattern of fungal diversity is still unclear. Here, we examined the diversity of fungi along a 1,000 m elevation gradient on Mount Nadu, Southwestern China. We used MiSeq sequencing to obtain fungal sequences that were clustered into operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and to measure the fungal composition and diversity. Though the species richness and phylogenetic diversity of the fungal community did not exhibit significant trends with increasing altitude, they were significantly lower at mid-altitudinal sites than at the base. The Bray-Curtis distance clustering also showed that the fungal communities varied significantly with altitude. A distance-based linear model multivariate analysis (DistLM) identified that soil pH dominated the explanatory power of the species richness (23.72%), phylogenetic diversity (24.25%) and beta diversity (28.10%) of the fungal community. Moreover, the species richness and phylogenetic diversity of the fungal community increased linearly with increasing soil pH (P<0.05). Our study provides evidence that pH is an important predictor of soil fungal diversity along elevation gradients in Southwestern China.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41071039), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2012CB417103) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA05060100).

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Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Dan Liu, Guohua Liu, Li Chen, Juntao Wang & Limei Zhang

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Dan Liu & Li Chen

  3. Joint Center for Global Change Studies, Beijing, 100875, China

    Guohua Liu

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  1. Dan Liu
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  2. Guohua Liu
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  3. Li Chen
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  4. Juntao Wang
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Correspondence to Guohua Liu.

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Liu, D., Liu, G., Chen, L. et al. Soil pH determines fungal diversity along an elevation gradient in Southwestern China. Sci. China Life Sci. 61, 718–726 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-017-9200-1

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Keywords

  • fungi
  • diversity
  • elevation
  • soil pH