Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-67929-5
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) Landscape effects on global soil pathogenic fungal diversity across spatial scales
Author Lu, Y.; Eisenhauer, N.; Patoine, G.; Chen, Y.; Heintz-Buschart, A.; Küsel, K.; Wegner, C.-E.; Buscot, F.; Bei, Q. ORCID logo ; Frenzel, M. ORCID logo ; Rebmann, C.; Schädler, M. ORCID logo ; Schmidt, A. ORCID logo ; Seeber, J., et al.
Source Titel Nature Communications
Year 2026
Department BZF; NSF; iDiv; AECOL
Volume 17
Page From art. 1164
Language englisch
Topic T5 Future Landscapes
Data and Software links https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.26377660.v5
Supplements Supplement 1
Abstract Growing evidence has shown that, apart from local environmental factors, changes in landscape-level factors by accelerated land-use change can also shape soil pathogenic fungal diversity. However, the global representativeness of such patterns remains unclear. Here, we assess how pathogenic fungal diversity in 511 soil samples worldwide responds to landscape factors, including landscape complexity index based on eight landscape metrics and quantity of different land cover types across six spatial scales (i.e., surrounding landscape, 250 m to 10,000 m radii from the sampling coordinate). We find that while soil variables explain over half of the variance, pathogenic fungal alpha diversity increases with landscape complexity and crop cover proportion, but decreases with grass and tree cover proportion, together explaining 23.4% of the total variance. Landscape factors have weaker impacts on beta diversity, explaining 13.0% of the variance. Across spatial scales, grassland ecosystems exhibit increasingly stronger responses to landscape variables compared to forest ecosystems. Landscape factors have a higher relative contribution to root-associated fungi than leaf/fruit/seed-associated fungi. Our results emphasize the importance of local factors and the complementary role of landscape patterns in shaping global soil pathogenic fungal distributions, highlighting scale-dependent effects across ecosystems and fungal functional groups.
Lu, Y., Eisenhauer, N., Patoine, G., Chen, Y., Heintz-Buschart, A., Küsel, K., Wegner, C.-E., Buscot, F., Bei, Q., Frenzel, M., Rebmann, C., Schädler, M., Schmidt, A., Seeber, J., et al. (2026):
Landscape effects on global soil pathogenic fungal diversity across spatial scales
Nat. Commun. 17 , art. 1164 10.1038/s41467-025-67929-5