Itumeleng Moroenyane

Stellenbosch University | SUN · Department of Botany and Zoology

The South African Fynbos is the smallest floristic kingdom with high levels of endemism and where fire dominates the landscape. However, drivers of soil microbial distribution and diversity are still poorly understood. This study aims to highlight the biogeographical patterns of bacterial and fungal communities and elucidate the mechanisms that med...

Managed agricultural ecosystems are unique systems where crops and microbes are intrinsically linked. This study focuses on discerning microbiome successional patterns across all plant organs and tests for evidence of niche differentiation along temporal and spatial axes. Soybean plants were grown in an environmental chamber till seed maturation. S...

Understanding the dynamics of plant-associated microbial communities within agriculture is well documented. However, the ecological processes that assemble the plant microbiome are not well understood. This study elucidates the relative dominance of assembly processes across plant compartments (root, stem, and leaves) and developmental stages (emer...

Nematodes play an important role in ecosystems, yet very little is known about their assembly processes and the factors influencing them. We studied nematode communities in bulk soil from three Asian mountain ecosystems to study the assembly processes of free-living nematode metacommunities and their driving factors. On each mountain, elevations sp...

To reveal the effect of the interactions between soil depth and different land use types on soil nutrients and soil bacterial communities in a karst area, fifty soil samples from five different karst land use types in Huajiang town, Guizhou province, Southwest China were collected, and the soil bacteria were analyzed using high-throughput absolute...

Soil fungi play an important role in promoting nutrient cycling and maintaining ecosystem stability. Yet, there has been little understanding of how fungal co-occurrence networks differ along elevational climate gradients, a topic of interest to both macroecology and climate change studies. Based on high-throughput sequencing technology, we investi...

Endophytic microbiome of healthy seeds forms a symbiotic relationship with their host. Seeds and environment are sources of microbes that colonise the developing plant, however, the influence of each remains unclear. Here, using irradiation combined with surface sterilisation to generate near-axenic seeds with disrupted and reduced microbiome, we c...

Although many studies have explored patterns of fungal community diversity and composition along various environmental gradients, the trends of co-occurrence networks across similar gradients remain elusive. Here, we constructed co-occurrence networks for fungal community along a 2300 m elevation gradient on Mt Norikura, Japan, hypothesizing a prog...

Microbial biogeographical patterns in Mediterranean ecosystems are becoming widely documented; however, the influences of slope aspect on the microbial community composition and structure are poorly understood. This study tested the hypotheses that slope aspect and organic matter content would influence microbial diversity patterns and distribution...

Little is known of how fungal distribution ranges vary with elevation. We studied fungal diversity and community composition from 740 to 2940 m above sea level on Mt. Norikura, Japan, sequencing the ITS2 region. There was a clear trend, repeated across each of the fungal phyla (Basidiomycota, Ascomycota, Zygomycota, Chytridomycota and Glomeromycota...

Climate change is predicted to have adverse impacts on terrestrial ecosystems and uncertainties exist on how these systems will respond. Terrestrial plant ecosystems can be divided by how they fix atmospheric carbon- C3, C4 and CAM photosynthesis pathways. However, as for now, no clear answers could be given regarding the future global repartition...

There is considerable interest in the factors which may explain variation in microbial community assembly processes. In this study, we investigated bacterial community assembly, phylogenetic diversity and the relative role of deterministic and stochastic processes along environmental gradients on Mt. Norikura, Japan. DNA extracted from soil samples...

Southeast Asia is well-known for its species-rich tropical rainforest, representing a "hotspot" of biodiversity. However, for the past several decades, the biodiversity of this region has been under severe threat due to rapid land use changes, including clearance of forests for agriculture. Soil microorganisms not only make up a large proportion of...

The Israeli Mediterranean ecosystem has a distinctive flora with high levels of plant diversity. Previous studies of soil microbial ecology from the region have paid little attention to the possibility of distinctive soil bacterial communities associated with particular habitats. This study looked at bacterial communities present in the bulk soil f...

Little is known about how nematode ecology differs across elevational gradients. We investigated the soil nematode community along a ~2,200 m elevational range on Mt. Norikura, Japan, by sequencing the 18S rRNA gene. As with many other groups of organisms, nematode diversity showed a high correlation with elevation, and a maximum in mid-elevations....

Nematodes are among the most abundant metazoans in soils, but their true diversity and distribution patterns remain poorly investigated, especially in polar environments. Here, we studied three high Arctic tundra sites at Kongsford, NW Svalbard (78°55′N) to understand: (1) Whether there is detectable small-scale habitat variation, (2) What the pred...

The Mediterranean Fynbos vegetation of South Africa is well known for its high levels of diversity, endemism, and the existence of very distinct plant communities on different soil types. Studies have documented the broad taxonomic classification and diversity patterns of soil microbial diversity, but none has focused on the community assembly proc...

In many ecosystems, little is known of what influences the landscape-scale community structure of soil nematodes. We were interested in whether deterministic or stochastic factors dominate in terms of nematode community variation. We used a novel metagenetic approach to investigate variation in nematode community structure in the Fynbos vegetation...

The Fynbos biome of South Africa is renowned for its high levels of plant diversity, endemism, and heterogeneous soils. Studies have elucidated the broad taxonomic classification and diversity patterns of soil nematodes in Fynbos. However, the majority of these studies have only looked at the diversity of plant-feeding nematode, and none have compa...

Directional replacement and directional non-replacement models are two alternative paradigms for community development in primary successional environments. The first model emphasizes turnover in species between early and late successional niches. The second emphasizes accumulation of additional diversity over time. To test whether the development...

The Mediterranean Fynbos vegetation of South Africa is well known for its high levels of diversity, endemism, and the existence of very distinct plant communities on different soil types. Studies have documented the broad taxonomic classification and diversity patterns of soil microbial diversity, but none has focused on the community assembly proc...