Stavros Veresoglou

Sun Yat-Sen University | SYSU · Department of Ecology

Early terrestrial plants colonizing land likely relied on arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) associations to meet their nutrient needs (Smith and Read 2008 but see Bidartondo et al. 2011). Despite occasional diversifications towards other mycorrhizal association strategies (Hoeksema 2010; Feijen et al. 2018), the AM symbiosis shows a remarkable persistenc...

Droughts exarcerbate Plant–soil feedbacks (PSFs) making positive PSFs more positive and negative PSFs more negative. Alterations in PSFs that droughts induce could relate to the rooting depth of the tested plants. We present some rare evidence on how a driver of global change will alter a biotic interaction.

Symbioses involving microorganisms prevail in nature and are key to regulating numerous ecosystem processes and in driving evolution. A major concern in understanding the ecology of symbioses involving microorganisms arises in the effectiveness of sampling strategies to capture the contrasting size of organisms involved. In many mutualisms, includi...

Our understanding of the physiological mechanisms of the plant hormetic response to countless environmental contaminants is rapidly advancing. However, the microbiome is a critical determinant of plant responses to stressors, thus possibly influencing hormetic responses. Here, we review the otherwise neglected role of microbes in shaping plant stim...

Modernizing agricultural practices of smallholder farmers can increase considerably global food produce. Smallholder farmers are, nevertheless, often unwilling to adopt practices unfamiliar to them. Increases in the cost of fertilizers, can nonetheless render existing practices unsustainable, raising concerns of food injustice. We addressed here th...

Rarely do we observe competitive exclusion within plant communities, even though plants compete for a limited pool of resources. Thus, our understanding of the mechanisms sustaining plant biodiversity might be limited. In this study, we explore two common ecological strategies, species sorting and character displacement, that promote coexistence by...

Aim Addressing how woody plant species are distributed in space can reveal inconspicuous drivers that structure plant communities. The spatial structure of conspecifics varies not only at local scales across co‐existing plant species but also at larger biogeographical scales with climatic parameters and habitat properties. The possibility that biog...

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...

Background and Aims The agriculture sector is a major producer of greenhouse gases. To successfully transition to a green economy, we should further optimise agriculture practices so that we offset emissions while preserving crop productivity. We questioned here how two common organic management practices, reducing irrigation and conservation tilla...

In Sustainable Horizons: Most existing literature pictures mycorrhizas as the golden grail for food production but almost nobody uses them outside academia. We here explored why this is the case and arrived at the conclusion that the literature does not appeal sufficiently to the needs of the producers and this forms a bottleneck that prevents expa...

To cope with global change, plants shift their distributions. Distribution shifts tend to be more dramatic across rare species. We here questioned how the distribution range of eight rare woody species is changing and how effectively the plants cope with the shift. We further addressed whether plant traits that could predict those parameters. We ca...

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...

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...

Despite their ubiquity in terrestrial ecosystems, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) experience dispersion constraints and thus depend on the spatial distribution of the plant hosts. Our understanding of fungal-plant interactions with respect to their spatial distributions and implications for the functioning of the symbiosis remain limited. We her...

Background The vast majority of terrestrial plants, including most crops, associate with fungi of the phylum Glomeromycota to form symbiotic associations, known as arbuscular mycorrhizas. Arbuscular mycorrhizas play a pivotal role in the terrestrial cycling of nitrogen (N). Recent advances in mycorrhizal research show that arbuscular mycorrhizal fu...

Higher Education Press Highlights ·On average conventional tillage outperformed no tillage. ·Across fertilized trials, however, no tillage performed best. ·Aridity increases yield benefits of no tillage over conventional tillage. ·Fertile settings favor conventional tillage over no tillage. Graphical Abstract Stavros D. Veresoglou et al. Conditions...

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Ecologists have long debated the properties that confer stability to complex, species-rich ecological networks. Species-level soil food...

Many woody and herbaceous plants in temperate forests cannot establish and survive in the absence of mycorrhizal associations. Most temperate forests are dominated by ectomycorrhizal woody plant species, which implies that the carrying capacity of the habitat for arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) is relatively low and AMF could in some cases exper...

Southern Amazonia is currently experiencing extensive land use change from forests to agriculture caused by increased local and global demand for agricultural products. However, little is known about the impacts of deforestation and land use change on soil biota. We investigated two regions in southern Amazonia (rainforest and Savannah/Cerrado biom...

In light of the limited resources of phosphorus (P) fertilizer, investigating the response of organic P (Po)-mineralizing microbial communities on the resource supply can be an avenue to optimize P recycling in agricultural systems. The alkaline phosphomonoesterase (alkaline PAse)-encoding gene PhoD is universally occurring in soil microorganisms....

The roots of most plants host diverse assemblages of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which benefit the plant hosts in diverse ways. Even though we understand that such AMF assemblages are non-random, we do not fully appreciate whether and how environmental settings can make them more or less predictable in time and space. Here we present result...

Many woody and herbaceous plants in temperate forests cannot establish and survive in the absence of mycorrhizal associations. Here, we address and hierarchize how Glomeromycota, a group of soil-borne fungi, forming a ubiquitous type of mycorrhiza, varied in a temperate forest patch in Germany with time, space, plant hosts but also the proximity to...

Global environmental change poses threats to plant and soil biodiversity. Yet, whether soil biodiversity loss can further influence plant community’s response to global change is still poorly understood. We created a gradient of soil biodiversity using the dilution‐to‐extinction approach, and investigated the effects of soil biodiversity loss on pl...

The role of mutualisms in mediating temporal stability in an ecosystem has been debated extensively. Here, we focus on how a ubiquitous mutualism, arbuscular mycorrhiza, influences temporal stability of a key ecosystem process, ecosystem respiration. We discriminated between two forms of temporal stability, temporal variability and resilience, and...

Nutrient enrichment can reduce ecosystem stability, typically measured as temporal stability of a single function, e.g. plant productivity. Moreover, nutrient enrichment can alter plant‐soil interactions (e.g. mycorrhizal symbiosis) that determine plant community composition and productivity. Thus, it is likely that nutrient enrichment and interact...

When running a lab we do not think about calamities, since they are rare events for which we cannot plan while we are busy with the day-to-day management and intellectual challenges of a research lab. No lab team can be prepared for something like a pandemic such as COVID-19, which has led to shuttered labs around the globe. But many other types of...

Elevated tropospheric ozone concentrations induce adverse effects in plants. We reviewed how ozone affects (i) the composition and diversity of plant communities by affecting key physiological traits; (ii) foliar chemistry and the emission of volatiles, thereby affecting plant-plant competition, plant-insect interactions, and the composition of ins...

Interdisciplinary science is rapidly advancing to address complex human-environment interactions. River science aims to provide the methods and knowledge required to sustainably manage some of the planet’s most important and vulnerable ecosystems; and there is a clear need for river managers and scientists to be trained within an interdisciplinary...

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...

When running a lab, we do not think about calamities, since they are rare events for which we cannot plan while we are busy with the day-to-day management and intellectual challenges of a research lab. No lab team can be prepared for something like a pandemic such as COVID-19, which has led to shuttered labs around the globe. But many other types o...

Arbuscular mycorrhiza represents an ubiquitous nutritional symbiosis between the roots of most terrestrial plant species and fungi of the subphylum Glomeromycotina (Spatafora et al., 2016). Terrestrial habitats are unlikely to be limited in propagules of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), because AMF propagule densities build up fast in vegetated...

Aims Biofumigation, the burying of Brassicaceaous plant tissues to suppress soil pests, is an increasingly practiced technique. However, the efficiency of biofumigation varies considerably and motivated our meta-analysis on the topic. Methods We meta-analyzed data from 46 publications where 934 experiments used 363 unique controls, in order to det...

Denitrification is an ecosystem process linked to ongoing climate change, because it releases nitrous oxide (N2O) into the atmosphere. To date, the literature covers mostly how aboveground (i.e. plant community structure) and belowground (i.e. plant-associated soil microbes) biota separately influence denitrification in isolation of each other. We...

Nitrification represents a central process in the cycling of nitrogen (N) which in high-fertility habitats can occasionally be undesirable. Here, we explore how arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) impacts nitrification when N availability is not limiting to plant growth. We wanted to test which of the mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature bes...

Most terrestrial plants depend strongly on associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi (Subphylum: Glomeromycotina) to establish and survive (Bever, 2002; van der Heijden et al., 1998; Klironomos et al., 2011; Veresoglou et al., 2017), and have evolved a nutritional mutualism. In this mutualism, the plant provides carbon to the fungus, usua...

The recent realization that entire communities fuse and separate (community coalescence) has led to a reappraisal of the forces determining species diversity and dynamics, especially in microbial communities where coalescence is likely widespread. To understand if connectedness by coalescence results in different outcomes from connectedness by indi...

The diversity patterns of plants at large scale are broadly documented, but that of soil fungi remains elusive. Limited reports on soil fungal biogeography mainly are based on species richness. We carried out a large-scale field investigation on soil fungi originating from 365 forest plots covering five climate zones in China. We tested whether and...

Nitrous oxide (N 2 O) is a potent greenhouse gas emitted at considerable rates from agricultural soils. A few recent studies have indicated the potential to reduce N 2 O emission rates in agricultural systems through management of soil microbiota, such as mycorrhizal fungi. Our limited understanding of how mycorrhiza influences N 2 O emission rates...

Intraspecific variability in ecological traits confers the ability of a species to adapt to an ever‐changing environment. Fractions of biomass allocation in plants (BAFs) represent both ecological traits and direct expressions of investment strategies and so have important implications on plant fitness, particularly under current global change. We...

High biodiversity aboveground tends to increase the stability of ecosystem functioning when faced with a changing environment. However, whether and how soil biota affect ecosystem stability is less clear. Here, we introduce a framework for understanding the effects of soil biota on variation in ecosystem functioning under environmental changes. We...

Glomeromycotinan fungi associate with plant roots in a ubiquitous mutualism, the arbuscular mycorrhiza. Vegetation type, spatial distance, and environmental variability represent the three main factors shaping the structure of Glomeromycotinan communities. We present here one of the most comprehensive reports on Glomeromycotinan community structure...

Association of plants with arbuscular mycorrhizal ( AM ) fungi may act as either an equalizing or a stabilizing mechanism of coexistence, but the effect of the symbiosis likely depends on the responsiveness to fungi of plant species within a community, rather than simply as a binary metric based on presence or absence of AM fungi. Here, we test the...

Key message We reanalysed a dataset of tree distribution ranges in Europe to identify which plant traits best explain migration potential in woody species. Contrary to our intuition that tree longevity would best explain the ability of trees to migrate, we found that seed biomass was the only good descriptor of migration potential: trees with heavi...

Because Journal Clubs (JClubs) represent valued educational tools, we often assume optimality of Journal Club practices. We analyze here JClubs records from a research group to identify factors that modify how much attendants benefit from discussing a paper. We demonstrate that attendants benefit most from papers focusing on systems similar to thos...

Background and aims Plant diversity – ecosystem processes relationships are essential to our understanding of ecosystem functioning. We aimed at disentangling the nature of such relationships in a mesotrophic grassland that was highly heterogeneous with regards to nutrient availability. Methods Rather than targeting primary productivity, like most...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are symbiotic fungi with a broad distribution, and many taxa have physiological and ecological adaptations to specific environments, including semiarid ecosystems. Our aim was to address regional distribution patterns of AMF communities in such semiarid environments based on spore morphological techniques. We asse...

Despite the inarguable importance of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in terrestrial ecosystems, we know little about how AMF communities shift in response to climate changes. In this study, we investigated the impacts of seven years of precipitation increment and nitrogen (N) addition on the taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of AMF communitie...

Background and aims Plant diversity – ecosystem processes relationships are essential to our understanding of ecosystem functioning. We aimed at disentangling the nature of such relationships in a mesotrophic grassland that was highly heterogeneous with regards to nutrient availability. Methods Rather than targeting primary productivity, like most...

Fungi play an important regulating role in terrestrial ecosystem functioning. However, their biogeo-graphic distribution patterns along combined gradients of plant communities and environmental variables across regional spatial scales remain poorly understood. This knowledge gap is particularly pronounced in arid and semi-arid grassland ecosystems,...

In late-successional environments, low in available nutrient such as the forest understory, herbaceous plant individuals depend strongly on their mycorrhizal associates for survival. We tested whether in temperate European forests arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) woody plants might facilitate the establishment of AM herbaceous plants in agreement with t...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are ubiquitous mutualists of terrestrial plants and play key roles in regulating various ecosystem processes, but little is known about AMF biogeography at regional scale. This study aims at exploring the key predictors of AMF communities across a 5000-km transect in northern China. We determined the soil AMF spec...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are ubiquitous mutualists of terrestrial plants and play key roles in regulating various ecosystem processes, but little is known about AMF biogeography at regional scale. This study aims at exploring the key predictors of AMF communities across a 5000-km transect in northern China. We determined the soil AMF spec...

The physiological tolerance hypothesis (PTH) postulates that it is the tolerance of species to climatic factors that determines overall community richness. Here, we tested whether a group of mutualistic microbes, Glomeromycota, is distributed in semi-arid environments in ways congruent with the PTH. For this purpose, we modeled with climatic predic...

Soil filamentous fungi play a prominent role in regulating ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems. This necessitates understanding their responses to climate change drivers in order to predict how nutrient cycling and ecosystem services will be influenced in the future. Here, we provide a quantitative synthesis of ten studies on soil funga...

Abstract Most soil fungi experience a constantly fluctuating environment, and coping with resulting biotic and biotic stressors can come at a considerable metabolic cost. We know that organisms respond better to severe stresses (triggering stress) when they have experienced a similar milder stress (priming stress) before. Asking how long organisms...

Understanding scaling relationships in ecology can foster the development of valuable predictive tools and also pave the ground towards the formulation of better mechanistic models. The species–area relationship (SAR) is a classical example of an empirical relationship between species richness (S) and sampling area (A). This relationship arises fro...

No species lives on earth forever. Knowing when and why species go extinct is crucial for a complete understanding of the consequences of anthropogenic activity, and its impact on ecosystem functioning. Even though soil biota play a key role in maintaining the functioning of ecosystems, the vast majority of existing studies focus on aboveground org...

Progress in microbial ecology over the last few decades has resulted in a new generation of global change models that contemplate microbial feedbacks and offer predictions of an unparalleled accuracy (1). The microbial components of these models are getting increasingly more realistic. In PNAS, Crowther et al. (2) examine how microbes might respond...

This study investigated the factors underlying the variability of needle and soil elemental composition and stoichiometry and their relationships with growth in Pinus sylvestris forests throughout the species' distribution in Europe by analysing data from 2245 forest stands. Needle N concentrations and N:P ratios were positively correlated with tot...

Microbial communities are enigmatically diverse. We propose a novel view of processes likely affecting microbial assemblages, which could be viewed as the Great American Interchange en miniature: the wholesale exchange among microbial communities resulting from moving pieces of the environment containing entire assemblages. Incidental evidence for...

Many mutualisms involve reciprocal exploitation, such that each species in a mutualism is a consumer of a resource provided by the other. Frequently, such mutualisms are reformed each generation, and where they involve close physiological contact, such as between mycorrhizal fungi and plants, they can be considered as examples of reciprocal parasit...

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...

AimPlant elemental composition and stoichiometry are crucial for plant structure and function. We studied to what extent elemental stoichiometry in plants might be strongly related to environmental drivers and competition from coexisting species.LocationEurope.Methods We analysed foliar N, P, K, Ca and Mg concentrations and their ratios among 50 sp...

An increasing number of ecological studies compare the diversity of microbial taxa along environmental gradients or between imposed treatments. Estimates are often based on analysis-of-variance of taxon-richness inferred from pyrosequencing data. We conducted a reanalysis of three 454-pyrosequencing studies on arbuscular-mycorrhizal-fungal diversit...