Carlos Aguilar Trigueros

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Institute of Biology

Temporal variation during the assembly of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal communities within plant roots have been posited as critical drivers of the plant-fungal symbiotic outcomes. However, functional implications of these dynamics for the host plant remain poorly understood. We conducted a controlled pot experiment with Sorghum bicolor to inv...

Motivation: Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are integral to plant nutrient acquisition, carbon cycling, and ecosystem resilience, yet our knowledge of their biogeography is severely limited, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia, despite its landmass and unique ecological characteristics, has been vastly undersampled, leaving a signifi...

Knowledge of differential life‐history strategies in arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is relevant for understanding the ecology of this group and its potential role in sustainable agriculture and carbon sequestration. At present, AM fungal life‐history theories often focus on differential investment into intra‐ vs extraradical structures among AM...

Established ecological theory has focused on unitary organisms, and thus its concepts have matured into a form that often hinders rather than facilitates the ecological study of modular organisms. Here, we use the example of filamentous fungi to develop concepts that enable integration of non‐unitary (modular) organisms into the established communi...

Fungi are among the most diverse and ecologically important kingdoms in life. However, the distributional ranges of fungi remain largely unknown as do the ecological mechanisms that shape their distributions1,2. To provide an integrated view of the spatial and seasonal dynamics of fungi, we implemented a globally distributed standardized aerial sam...

Trait-based frameworks are promising tools to understand the functional consequences of community shifts in response to environmental change. The applicability of these tools to soil microbes is limited by a lack of functional trait data and a focus on categorical traits. To address this gap for an important group of soil microorganisms, we identif...

Typified by ancient soils and unique assemblages of flora, Australia provides opportunities to expand our understanding of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. Despite their ubiquity, key aspects of Australian AM fungal ecology remain buried due to our limited knowledge of their biogeography and their potential adaptation to Australia's environmental...

Despite host‐fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life‐history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free‐living...

A major goal in ecology is understanding the factors which determine the diversity and distribution of organisms. The outcome of the symbiotic relationship between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is strongly influenced by soil phosphorus (P) availability. Despite this knowledge, there is still much to uncover about how soil P status ca...

Genomic traits reflect the evolutionary processes that have led to ecological variation among extant organisms, including variation in how they acquire and use resources. Soil fungi have diverse nutritional strategies and exhibit extensive variation in fitness along resource gradients. We tested for trade‐offs in genomic traits with mycelial nutrit...

Across free-living organisms, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology is shaped by interactions with biotic and abiotic environments during dispersal and early establishment in new habitats. However, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology for symbiotic species has been largely ignored despite host-symbiont interactions being ub...

Global change has been predominantly studied from the prism of ‘how much' rather than ‘how fast' change occurs. Associated to this, there has been a focus on environmental drivers crossing a critical value and causing so‐called regime shifts. This presupposes that the rate at which environmental conditions change is slow enough to allow the ecologi...

Fungi play key roles in ecosystems and human societies as decomposers, nutrient cyclers, mutualists, and pathogens. Estimates suggest that roughly 3–13 million fungal species exist worldwide, yet considerable knowledge gaps exist regarding the mechanisms and consequences, both ecological and social, of fungal dispersal from local to global scales....

Drought causes soil feedback effects on plant performance. However, how the linkages between conditioned soil biota and root traits contribute to explain plant–soil feedback (PSF) as a function of drought is unknown. We utilized soil inoculum from a conditioning experiment where grassland species grew under well‐watered and drought conditions, and...

Global change has been predominantly studied from the prism of ‘how much’ rather than ‘how fast’ change occurs. The paradigm underlying the former assumes that a smooth change in an environmental driver can force a regime shift between alternative states (Bifurcation-tipping). This presupposes that environmental conditions change at a rate which al...

Root traits respond to drought in a species‐specific manner, but little is known about how soil fungal communities and root traits respond to drought in concert. In a glasshouse experiment, we determined the response of soil pathogens, saprotrophs, and mutualistic and all fungi associated with the roots of 24 plant species subjected to drought. At...

Microplastics in soils have become an important threat for terrestrial systems as they may potentially alter the geochemical/biophysical soil environment and can interact with drought. As microplastics may affect soil water content, this could exacerbate the well‐known negative effects of drought on ecosystem functionality. Thus, functions includin...

Microplastics in soils have become an important threat for terrestrial systems, which can be exacerbated by drought as microplastics may affect soil water content. Thus, the interaction between these two factors may alter ecosystem functions such as litter decomposition, stability of soil aggregates, as well as functions related to nutrient cycling...

A recent study by Sugiura and coworkers reported the non‐symbiotic growth and spore production of an arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungus, Rhizophagus irregularis, when the fungus received an external supply of certain fatty acids, myristates (C:14). This discovery follows the insight that AM fungi receive fatty acids from their hosts when in symbios...

Fungi play many essential roles in ecosystems. They facilitate plant access to nutrients and water, serve as decay agents that cycle carbon and nutrients through the soil, water and atmosphere, and are major regulators of macro‐organismal populations. Although technological advances are improving the detection and identification of fungi, there sti...

Abstract Movement ecology aims to provide common terminology and an integrative framework of movement research across all groups of organisms. Yet such work has focused on unitary organisms so far, and thus the important group of filamentous fungi has not been considered in this context. With the exception of spore dispersal, movement in filamentou...

Many factors influence global change Global environmental change is driven by multiple natural and anthropogenic factors. With a focus on global change as it affects soils, Rillig et al. point out that nearly all published studies consider just one or two factors at a time (see the Perspective by Manning). In a laboratory experiment, they tested 10...

Drought can strongly modify plant diversity and ecosystem processes. As droughts are expected to intensify in the future, it is important to better understand plant responses to drought. We expect that roots traits constitute an overlooked but powerful predictor of plant responses as roots are in direct contact with the soil environment, taking up...

Fungi play many essential roles in ecosystems. They facilitate plant access to nutrients and water, serve as decay agents that cycle carbon and nutrients through the soil, water and atmosphere, and are major regulators of macro-organismal populations. Although technological advances are improving the detection and identification of fungi, there sti...

All ecological disciplines consider temporal dynamics, although relevant concepts have been developed almost independently. We here introduce basic principles of temporal dynamics in ecology. We figured out essential features that describe temporal dynamics by finding similarities among about 60 ecological concepts and theories. We found that consi...

Offspring size is a key trait for understanding the reproductive ecology of species, yet studies addressing the ecological meaning of offspring size have so far been limited to macro-organisms. We consider this a missed opportunity in microbial ecology and provide what we believe is the first formal study of offspring-size variation in microbes usi...

Fungi are prominent components of every ecosystem—in terms of biomass, diversity and functioning. However, in contrast to many other taxonomic groups, we have a poor mechanistic understanding of the patterns in fungal community organization and functioning.

Understanding the effects of root-associated microbes in explaining plant community patterns represents a challenge in community ecology. Although typically overlooked, several lines of evidence point out that nonmycorrhizal, root endophytic fungi in the Ascomycota may have the potential to drive changes in plant community ecology given their ubiqu...

A couple years ago, I asked my Ph.D. adviser why he decided to give me a position in his lab. His answer was simple. “Because you were so focused on finding good questions,” he told me. I found this answer amusing, because my early scientific training hadn't fostered this skill at all. In my

See also the Commentary by Duran-Flores and Heil

Fungal ecology lags behind in the use of traits (i.e. phenotypic characteristics) to understand ecological phenomena. We argue that this is a missed opportunity and that the selection and systematic collection of trait data throughout the fungal kingdom will reap major benefits in ecological and evolutionary understanding of fungi. To develop our a...

Fungal ecology lags behind in the use of traits (i.e. phenotypic characteristics) to understand ecological phenomena. We argue that this is a missed opportunity and that the selection and systematic collection of trait data throughout the fungal kingdom will reap major benefits in ecological and evolutionary understanding of fungi. To develop our a...

Classification schemes have been popular to tame the diversity of root-infecting fungi. However, the usefulness of these schemes is limited to descriptive purposes. We propose that a shift to a multidimensional trait-based approach to disentangle the saprotrophic-symbiotic continuum will provide a better framework to understand fungal evolutionary...