Disentangling the Biogeographic Responses and Assembly Patterns of Fungal Communities in Metalliferous Mining and Smelting Ecospheres
32 Pages Posted: 29 Apr 2022
Abstract
Elucidating community assembly and their relevance to environmental variables are fundamental for understanding microbial diversity and functioning in terrestrial ecosystems, yet the geographical diversity and assembly patterns of the fungal community in metalliferous ecospheres associated with mining and smelting activities have received penurious understandings. Here, the fungal communities collected from three groups of soils around the mining and smelting sites were profiled by Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) sequencing, in order to understand the geographical distributions of fungal community diversities, structures, compositions, assembly processes and the occurrence patterns. Our results indicated that, although the fungal abundances and diversities were similar among the three groups of soils, the metal(loid)s level significantly decreased the fungal abundances and diversities. 15 fungal phyla including Ascomycota, Basidiomycota and Mortierellomycota were recognized across the samples. Significant differentiations of 12 abundant classes were observed among the groups. The community similarity significantly decreased with geographical distances. Metal(loid)s explained higher community variations (4.16%) relative to other factors (1.89%) and geography (1.21%). Stochastic dispersal limitation and undominated fraction were dominated relative to deterministic heterogeneous selection in total and individual site, respectively. This study highlighted the stochastic processes in governing the biogeography of fungal communities habitat mining and smelting ecospheres.
Keywords: Metalliferous contamination, ITS sequencing, Fungal community, Cooccurrence patterns, community assembly
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