Objective To reveal the effects of vegetation types on root-associated fungal community structure and function in the Fanjingshan World Heritage property, supportive data was provided to predict the relationships between visible vegetation types and invisible community structure in terrestrial ecosystem.

Method Three representative vegetation types, including an evergreen broadleaved forest (EBF), an evergreen and deciduous broad-leaved mixed forest (EDBMF) and a subalpine dwarf shrub (SDF), were investigated in the Fanjingshan. Illumina MiSeq sequencing and the FUNGuild annotation tool were used to obtain and analyse the characteristics of the root-associated fungal community structure and function in different vegetation types, and the contributions of soil properties, fine root traits and leaf traits to variations in composition of root-associated fungal community were also analysed.

Result Ascomycota and Basidiomycota were the two most abundant phyla, and undefined saprotroph, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, ectomycorrhizal fungi, plant pathogen, endophyte, fungal parasite and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi were the main guilds. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi were notably enriched in EBF, ectomycorrhizal fungi were more significantly abundant in EDBMF, and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi were significantly overrepresented in SDF. The significant difference in the composition of root-associated fungi among vegetation types was confirmed by non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis and permutational multivariate analysis of variance. A higher alpha diversity was detected in EBF, and the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity index was significantly lower in SDF than in EBF and EDBMF. Aggregated boosted tree analysis indicated that root carbon content was the primary factor influencing observed richness, while leaf dry matter content was the dominant factors associated with the changes in Shannon index, Simpson index and Pielou index of root-associated fungi. Redundancy analysis showed that changes in vegetation type, soil pH, root carbon content and leaf carbon content could significantly affect the fungal community composition. The variance partitioning analysis further revealed that vegetation type had the greatest impact on the composition of root-associated fungi, followed by fine root traits and soil properties, and leaf traits had the least impact.

Conclusion Vegetation type can significantly affect root-associated fungal community structure. There is a specific relationship between vegetation type and functional taxa, and plant traits affect the construction of fungal communities.