Speaker
Description
The phyllosphere comprises the tissues and the surface of plant leaves and their microbiomes. Despite its ecological significance, the factors shaping foliar endophyte communities and their interactions with trees and shrubs remain largely unexplored. Here we use the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research platform BEF-China, where trees were planted in a broken-stick design along a tree diversity gradient. The aim of this study is to elucidate the composition of fungal and bacterial communities in the phyllosphere of shrubs, as a function of tree diversity in the local neighbourhood, and to disentangle the underlying drivers, such as leaf traits of the host tree, direct spillover effects of microbes from heterospecific neighbours and negative density effects of conspecific neighbour species, as well as indirect effects of neighbour tree composition via microclimate. Using leaf surface sterilization followed by next generation sequencing, the Internal Transcribed Spacer 1 (ITS1) rRNA gene region and the 16S rRNA gene region were analysed for fungal and bacterial communities, respectively. We hypothesized that [H1] the removal of epiphyllous microbes through surface sterilization has a major influence on the microbial community structure of the phyllosphere, because of a prevalence of microbes on the outside of the leaves. Furthermore, we expected that [H2] the tree neighbourhood diversity has a strong effect on the foliar microbial community composition and diversity, due to spillover and dilution effects. Finally, we expect that [H3] neighbourhood tree species richness increases the stability of the microclimate for shrubs, due to a denser canopy and increased structural diversity. There was evidence in support of all our three hypotheses, which reveals the complex interplay of different drivers in phyllosphere community assembly, which directly or indirectly depend on the local diversity of host trees.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
|---|---|
| Poster Presentation Option | Yes, I’m willing to present as a poster. |
