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

由于菌根真菌在植物寄主中诱导的明显的适应性效应，菌根生态已成为植物生态的重要组成部分。受扩散限制的生物体可以通过空间依赖来调节其种群动态。解释这种依赖的一种方法是通过整合元社区理论。虽然植物中的扩散限制已经被广泛研究，但对于它们的菌根共生体来说却并非如此。丛枝菌根(AM)是一种特别重要的菌根类型，因为它们在自然界中普遍存在，是在农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具有解释与AM真菌群落动态的α和β多样性估计相关的变异性的潜力。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成分，以及一个有希望的建模练习，将确定适合微生物的元群落范例。AM真菌的元群落行为很少被研究，因此这种方法有可能极大地提高我们对AM关联的生态学理解；同时，我们的研究系统将代表元群落动态的一个重要案例研究

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