Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi

Response to environmental gradients

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi vary across many environmental gradients. Their tolerance to freezing and drying is known to shift between AM fungal taxa. AM fungi become less prevalent and diverse at higher soil nutrient and moisture concentrations, presumably because both plants allocate less carbon to AM fungi and AM fungi reallocate their resources to intraradical hyphae in these environmental conditions. Over the long term, these environmental conditions can even create local adaptation between plant hosts, AM fungi and the local soil nutrient concentrations. AM composition often becomes less diverse on mountain tops than at lower elevations, which is driven by the composition of plant species.