Soil microorganisms, such as fungi, are vital to the functioning of woodland ecosystems. They have many fundamental roles including driving decomposition and local nutrient cycling. The efficiency of these processes depend on not only which fungi are there, but also how they interact with each other, and their environment. Changes in climate, environmental conditions, and host-plant distributions can drive variation in fungal diversity and community structure ultimately impacting local ecosystem function. Land-use change can create changes in these environmental conditions, especially in woodlands. These include resource disruption, soil erosion, and pollution—all of which can affect soil fungal diversity, abundance, and function. In this study, we assessed soil-fungal community variation across a 65-km land-use gradient originating in New York City. From a total of 94 soil cores taken over two years in both spring and fall seasons, we extracted and amplified fungal DNA targeting the ITS1 region. Fungal communities were sequenced on an Illumnia system and analyzed in QIIME2. Further, we performed elemental and chemical analysis on a subset of soil cores. We predicted that the biogeochemical factors associated with variation in land use would correlate with distinct soil-fungal composition and structure at our sites.
Results/Conclusions
From 94 soil samples, we identified 7379 unique ASVs—the most abundant of which came from the phyla Agaricomycetes, Mortierellomycetes, and Sordariomycetes. Our results suggest that soil-fungal community composition varied distinctly at sites along the land-use gradient and this change was associated with distance away from New York City. Soil-fungal communities at sites defined as urban and suburban were more diverse than exurban communities and showed a shift in composition to more saprotrophs, Ascomycota, and Mortierellomycota. This suggests that these observations may result from the impacts of land-use change on soil. This is corroborated by our elemental analysis, which showed significant differences in many nonmetals and metals along the gradient, such as P and Pb (p < 0.05) and is consistent with results from similar studies in urban or near-urban areas. Future research will further explore the abiotic and biotic variables that is driving this variation in fungal community structure.