Fungal community composition varies spatially in a commercial potato field in response to soil properties and topographic features

The factors influencing the spatial distribution of fungal communities are commonly examined over large spatial scales but not at smaller scales. Given this, the extent to which soil properties and topographic features contribute to the diversity and distribution of fungal communities in an agricultural field needs to be further explored. We investigated the spatial distribution of soil fungal community composition from an ∼1100 m long transect with 83 sampling points in a commercial potato field with a rolling landform. The relative abundance of Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, and Mortierellomycota showed medium to strong spatial dependence with an autocorrelation range varying from ∼43 to 92 m, similar to the autocorrelation range of soil properties and topographic features. Most of the variability in fungal and saprotrophic community composition was explained by soil properties (15% and 11%, respectively) and spatial distance (16% and 15%, respectively) while topographic features contributed 8% and 5% of variability to total fungi and saprotrophic community composition, respectively. The fungal and saprotrophic community compositions were correlated with soil organic carbon, pH, and slope curvature, however, richness and Pielou’s evenness of the fungal communities and fungal biomass were not correlated with soil properties or topographic features. The results suggest that the spatial variation in fungal and saprotrophic community composition in response to soil properties and topographic features in this agricultural landscape was due to differences in assemblages of fungal amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) but not in differences in the number of fungal ASVs or fungal biomass measured using phospholipids fatty acids.