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

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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