Positive effects of organic farming on below‐ground mutualists: large‐scale comparison of mycorrhizal fungal communities in agricultural soils
- 22 March 2010
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in New Phytologist
- Vol. 186 (4), 968-979
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2010.03230.x
Abstract
The impact of various agricultural practices on soil biodiversity and, in particular, on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), is still poorly understood, although AMF can provide benefit to plants and ecosystems. Here, we tested whether organic farming enhances AMF diversity and whether AMF communities from organically managed fields are more similar to those of species-rich grasslands or conventionally managed fields. To address this issue, the AMF community composition was assessed in 26 arable fields (13 pairs of organically and conventionally managed fields) and five semi-natural grasslands, all on sandy soil. Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism community fingerprinting was used to characterize AMF community composition. The average number of AMF taxa was highest in grasslands (8.8), intermediate in organically managed fields (6.4) and significantly lower in conventionally managed fields (3.9). Moreover, AMF richness increased significantly with the time since conversion to organic agriculture. AMF communities of organically managed fields were also more similar to those of natural grasslands when compared with those under conventional management, and were less uniform than their conventional counterparts, as expressed by higher beta-diversity (between-site diversity). We suggest that organic management in agro-ecosystems contributes to the restoration and maintenance of these important below-ground mutualistsKeywords
This publication has 68 references indexed in Scilit:
- T-REX: software for the processing and analysis of T-RFLP dataBMC Bioinformatics, 2009
- The cultivation bias: different communities of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi detected in roots from the field, from bait plants transplanted to the field, and from a greenhouse trap experimentMycorrhiza, 2007
- Biotic interactions, ecological knowledge and agriculturePhilosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 2007
- Evaluation of LSU rRNA-gene PCR primers for analysis of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities via terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism analysisJournal of Microbiological Methods, 2007
- REMA: A computer-based mapping tool for analysis of restriction sites in multiple DNA sequencesJournal of Microbiological Methods, 2007
- Microbial diversity in the deep sea and the underexplored “rare biosphere”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006
- Global Distributions of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal FungiEcosystems, 2006
- EFFECTS OF BIODIVERSITY ON ECOSYSTEM FUNCTIONING: A CONSENSUS OF CURRENT KNOWLEDGEEcological Monographs, 2005
- Diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi colonising roots of the grass species Agrostis capillaris and Lolium perenne in a field experimentMycorrhiza, 2003
- Visualization of ribosomal DNA loci in spore interphasic nuclei of glomalean fungi by fluorescence in situ hybridizationMycorrhiza, 1999