Changes in Soil Fungal Community Structure with Increasing Disturbance Frequency

Although disturbance is thought to be important in many ecological processes, responses of fungal communities to soil disturbance have been little studied experimentally. We subjected a soil microcosm to physical disturbance, at a range of frequencies designed to simulate ecological disturbance events. We analyzed the fungal community structure using Illumina HiSeq sequencing of the ITS1 region. Fungal diversity was found to decline with the increasing disturbance frequencies, with no sign of the "humpback" pattern found in many studies of larger sedentary organisms. There is thus no evidence of an effect of release from competition resulting from moderate disturbance-which suggests that competition and niche overlap may not be important in limiting soil fungal diversity. Changing disturbance frequency also led to consistent differences in community composition. There were clear differences in OTU-level composition, with different disturbance treatments each having distinct fungal communities. The functional profile of fungal groups (guilds) was changed by the level of disturbance frequency. These predictable differences in community composition suggest that soil fungi can possess different niches in relation to disturbance frequency, or time since last disturbance. Fungi appear to be most abundant relative to bacteria at intermediate disturbance frequencies, on the time scale we studied here.