Recently, the soil ecology team of the School of Geographical Sciences of FNU has made important progress in the study of community construction of forest soil fungal. The team found that the community construction of total fungi, arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, and ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi consistently showed significant divergence by studying the diversity of forest soil fungi, community construction patterns and their influencing factors in eastern China, but the divergence of the EM fungal community was smaller. At the local scale, there was no obvious relationship between the divergence of the fungal community and the plant community. They also found that the three fungal communities showed obvious differences in tropical, subtropical and temperate climate zones, and the β-diversity (community heterogeneity) of soil fungi was significantly positively correlated with environmental heterogeneity. The study emphasized that on a local scale, the construction of fungal communities had strong divergence, which would limit the predictability of the results of fungal community construction. This research result was published in the famous botany journal New Phytologist (IF = 8.512), titled Assembly Processes Lead to Divergent Soil Fungal Communities Within and Among Twelve Forest Ecosystems Along a Latitudinal Gradient, with researcher Zheng Yong of the team the first author of the paper, and Professor He Jizheng and Researcher Hu Xingwei participating in this research. This research was supported by the basic work project of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the leading science and technology project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
(Translated by Huang Xiaoling / Reviewed by Chen Fang)