Journal
SCIENCE CHINA-LIFE SCIENCES
Volume 61, Issue 6, Pages 718-726Publisher
SCIENCE PRESS
DOI: 10.1007/s11427-017-9200-1
Keywords
fungi; diversity; elevation; soil pH
Categories
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [41071039]
- Ministry of Science and Technology of China [2012CB417103]
- Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [XDA05060100]
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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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