Soil fungal communities in the Alps Targeted Locus (Loci). soil metagenome

Despite their crucial role in ecosystem functioning, our understanding of the distribution of below-ground fungi is still limited, calling for more comprehensive studies of fungal biogeography along environmental gradients at various scales (from regional to global). Here, we investigated the richness of taxa of soil fungi and their phylogenetic diversity across a wide range of grassland types along a 2800 m elevation gradient at a large number of sites (213), stratified across a region of the western Swiss Alps (700 km2). We used 454 pyro-sequencing to obtain ITS1 fungal sequences that were clustered into operational taxonomic units (OTUs).