Can consideration of metacommunity theory improve estimates of community dynamics for arbuscular mycorhizal fungi?

菌根生态学已成为植物生态学的重要组成部分，因为菌根真菌在其植物宿主中具有显著的适应性效应。受扩散约束的生物种群动态受空间依赖关系的调节。解释这种依赖关系的一种方法是整合元社区理论。虽然在植物中广泛研究了扩散限制，但对于它们的菌根共生体来说并非如此。一种特别重要的菌根类型是丛枝菌根（AM），因为它们在自然界中无处不在，它们是作物中发现的最常见的菌根类型。在这里，我们的目的是评估元群落框架的实施是否以及在多大程度上有可能解释与am真菌群落动态的α和β多样性估计相关的变异性。我们提出了两个对照实验，将检查am真菌的元群落反应的不同组成部分，并提出了一个有希望的建模练习，将确定适合微生物有机体的元群落范式。AM真菌的元群落行为很少被研究，因此这种方法有可能大大提高我们对AM关联的生态学理解；同时，我们的研究系统将成为元群落动力学研究的一个重要案例

Mycorrhizal ecology has become an integral part of plant ecology due to the pronounced fitness effects that mycorrhizal fungi induce in their plant hosts. Organisms subject to dispersal constraints can have their population dynamics regulated by spatial dependencies. A way to account for such dependencies is through integrating metacommunity theory. While dispersal constraints have been extensively studied in plants, this is not true for their mycorrhizal symbionts. A mycorrhizal type of exceptional importance is arbuscular mycorrhizas (AM) because they are ubiquitous in nature and they are the commonest type of mycorrhiza found in crops. Here we aim at assessing whether and to what extent implementation of a metacommunity framework has the potential to explain variability associated with alpha- and beta- diversity estimates of AM-fungal community dynamics. We propose two controlled experiments that will examine different components of metacommunity responses of AM-fungi and a promising modelling exercise that will identify a suitable metacommunity paradigm for microbial organisms. Metacommunity behavior of AM-fungi has rarely been studied, and thus this approach has the potential to substantially improve our ecological understanding of AM associations; at the same time, our study system will represent an important case study of metacommunity dynamics