Soil tillage experiment to compare AM fungal diversity Raw sequence reads
Mechanical soil disturbance is among key factors influencing soil biodiversity in agriculture. One of the most traditional and widely used tillage practices is inversion tillage through annual soil ploughing. Although many soil organisms are sensitive to soil disturbance, fungi, due to their sessile lifestyle, relatively slow growth and filamentous body structure, could be highly impacted. Of particular interest in arable lands are arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, providing crop plants with numerous vital services such as nutrient acquisition and protection against abiotic and biotic stressors. In light of this, tillage practices that aim to reduce soil disturbance are often seen as a fungal-friendly alternative to conventional inversion tillage. Although local studies exist on the impacts of minimal tillage practices on AM fungi, the universality of this approach has been debated. Using high-throughput sequencing techniques in long-term field experiments in five European countries, we show that the effects of reduced tillage intensity need not be positive on AM fungal diversity and that the possible biodiversity benefits are likely highly contextual. Plots which were tilled using reduced tillage techniques had lower AM fungal richness in 3 countries, whereas in two, no significant differences were found.