2026/07/14 by Adam Frew, Manjeet Dhull, Sally Power +1 · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Mycorrhizal Fungi and Plant Interactions #Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics #Forest Ecology and Biodiversity Studies
paper · doi:10.1016/j.soilbio.2026.110250
Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal communities are highly patchy at microscales, meaning sampling decisions can strongly shape the communities detected. We used a long-term fertilisation experiment to compare three sampling strategies and two sample preservation methods to assess their influence on AM fungal diversity and taxon-specific detection. We found that sequencing individual subsamples detected substantially more taxa than compositing, which missed rare fungi and introduced phylogenetically structured biases that underrepresented certain fungal lineages. Short-term drying and freezing produced comparable community profiles. Together, these results show that AM fungal detection depends strongly on sampling strategy, highlighting the need to align sampling scales with the microscale processes structuring these symbioses.