plant community manipulation and spatialized analyses of AM fungi in 2 plant species. The AM fungal microbiota of a plant mesocosm experiment

How arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi communities assemble is a key question of ecology, considering their importance for ecosystem productivity. As plant spatial patterns constitute a mosaic of AM fungi habitats, we address the hypothesis that AM fungal community assembly is determined by plant community structure, both in space and time. We sampled individuals of two host-plant species from experimental communities, and assessed their roots AM fungal colonizers using mass sequencing. We related AM fungal community structure to the spatial distribution of neighboring plant species at different spatio-temporal scales. We demonstrated that processes of AM fungal community assembly (arrival and coexistence) strongly depended on past plant spatial patterns at narrow spatial scale. This spatial scale of response was also influenced by the host-plant species and its clonal propagation. Overall, we highlight that landscape ecology concepts could be transposed and adapted at a centimetric scale to address questions related to microorganisms’ community assembly