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Organized Oral Session

Hybrid Session

Session: : Using Traits to Understand the Natural History and Ecology of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi

OOS 5-2 - Specificity and environmental niche breadth of mycorrhizal fungi may predict their response to global change

Monday, August 7, 2023
1:45 PM – 2:00 PM PDT
Location: 255
Climate change is affecting every organism on the planet. Via their key role in the carbon cycle, some organisms, in particular mycorrhizal fungi, have the potential to be impacted by climate change and accelerate or dampen future warming. Yet determining fungal environmental tolerances and responses to climate change for unobservable and unculturable taxa in soil, such as arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi, remains one of the largest challenges in microbial ecology. Species distribution models (SDMs) can provide hypotheses for drivers of mycorrhizal fungal niches and therefore vulnerability to climate change. Using SDMs on over 100,000 georeferenced datapoints and hundreds of mycorrhizal fungal taxa, we found that AM fungi had up to 10x larger spatial ranges and 12x larger niches than EM fungi. Further, both AM and EM fungal niches were largely structured by broadscale climatic axes such as mean annual temperature or potential evapotranspiration with EM fungi typically occurring in colder and drier environments. Additionally, EM fungi tended to occur in soils with higher carbon stocks and lower pH relative to AM fungi. However, both EM and AM fungi demonstrated both specific and generalist strategies and incredible variation in which plant hosts they associated with. This finding, however, is tempered as most host niches were severely under sampled with a strong positive correlation between sampling effort and number of plant hosts colonized for both mycorrhizal fungal guilds. Regardless of plant host associations, because EM fungi generally have smaller niches and smaller geographic extents while also occurring in colder and drier habitats, these results suggest EM fungi may be more susceptible to climate change relative to AM fungi. Since EM-dominated ecosystems are generally considered to store more carbon compared to AM-dominated ecosystems, a significant reduction in EM fungal habitat could positively feedback to accelerate global warming.