The historic North Central Texas Prairies are declining at an alarming rate, which are in need of immediate conservation and restoration as they are the base of the ecosystems. To determine the effectiveness of living soil amendments on restoration of urban prairies, Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) has established three restoration plots: control (NN), living soil (LN) and living soil with Sustainable Growth Texas (LS). We studied symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi helping plants to access nutrients in this restoration project. Three random soil cores were collected from each treatment plot in March, 2018. Plant roots and mycorrhizal spores were extracted from the soils by wet sieving. Extracted spores were counted under microscope, while the roots were cleared and stained to prepare two microscope slides from each soil sample. Slides were observed and quantified under microscope for mycorrhizal propagules to find the percent colonization in plant community roots. Collected data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA to compare the means.
Results/Conclusions
The mycorrhizal hyphal colonization was found to be 52.50±13.65% in the roots collected from LN, while hyphal colonization from LS and NN were 40±8.85% and 47.67±8.76% respectively. Similarly, spore density was counted at 12.44±1.02 spores per gram of dry soil in LN, 10.46±4.70 spores per gram of dry soil in LS and10.56±4.54 spores per gram of dry soil in NN. We did not find any significance difference (p≤0.05) in hyphal colonization and spore density among the treatment plots. Our results suggest that living soil amendments and living soil with Sustainable Growth Texas (SGTX) did not increase hyphal colonization compared to control plots. Similarly, spore density did not increase by adding living soil and living soil with SGTX compared to control plots. Living soil amendments from local ranch did not help increase mycorrhizal fungi in plants growing at BRIT treatment plots. Further studies should focus on the plant diversity and soil nutrients to compare the effectiveness of living soil amendments to degraded urban landscape.