| description |
Marine-terrestrial colonization represents one of the most seminal transition in microbial ecology and evolution. Understanding the distribution and drivers of soil microbial communities in transient nascent ecosystems is critical giving the role of microbes in soil biogeochemistry and their multifaceted influence on ecosystem succession. Here we studied a well-established salt marsh chronosequence spanning over a century of ecosystem development and provide high-resolution patterns of fungal community composition, diversity and ecological succession through soil formation. Noteworthy, despite presenting 10- to 100-fold lowered fungal abundances, initial soil sites held comparable richness as observed for more mature soils. These initial sites also exhibited significant temporal variations in β-diversity, which may be attributed to the great dynamics imposed by the tides. The fungal community compositions changed substantially along the succession, revealing a clear signature of ecological replacement by gradually decoupling the marine environment towards a terrestrial system. Fungal taxonomic distributions were further interpreted in the context of their ecophysiology and potential role in the ecosystem. Moreover, distance-based linear modelling revealed soil physical structure and organic matter to be the best predictors of the shifts in fungal β-diversity along the chronosequence. Taken together, our study lays a basis of understanding of the spatiotemporally-determined fungal community dynamics in salt marsh soils and highlights their ecophysiological traits and adaptation in an evolving ecosystem. |