Soil Fungal Biodiversity for Plant and Soil Health, Volume II

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About this Research Topic

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Background

This Research Topic is prepared under the patronage of the Polish Mycological Society.

Fungi represent a large portion of the biodiversity on Earth and they are key players in soils where they provide numerous ecosystem functions. Soil fungi have pivotal ecological roles influencing plant health as symbionts, pathogens or decomposers. Soil fungal biodiversity is increasingly recognized as providing benefits to soil health as they facilitate or even control numerous ecosystem processes. Continued research on the identity, abundance, distribution and functioning of soil fungi, and on their various roles in soils are thus fundamental to better understand the dimensions of fungal biodiversity, its impact on plant health as well as the prevention of fungal diseases.

This Research Topic aims at collecting contributions that provide taxonomic, physiological, functional and ecological characterizations of soil fungal communities that aid to the understanding of their biology, interrelationships as well as the mechanisms that underpin the various ecosystem functions they provide in the soil environment.

This Research Topic focusing on environmental mycology encourages in particular to report sensitive, accurate and fast methods for the detection, identification and distribution of fungi, including metagenomic, metatranscriptomic and metabolomic approaches, as they increasingly reveal the impact of fungal biodiversity and functioning for soil and plant health.

As a result of the last new Biodiversity and European Green Deal strategies there has been a rapid expansion in the field of host-microbe interactions for sustainable agriculture and horticulture. The soil mycobiome, its associated microbes and metabolites have been shown to be involved in soil health and plant disease. In the light of the rapid expansion of the soil mycobiome and microbiome field we propose this Research Topic to bring increased awareness to the diverse effect of the soil mycobiome on plant and soil health.

The objective of this Research Topic is to collate a series of reviews, commentaries, and research articles on the role of the soil mycobiome and associated other microbes in sustainable agriculture, organic farming, agroecology and climate changes. This sub-topic can also include papers concerning: the links between mycobiomes and microbiomes of soils with mycobiomes of plants, animals and humans. It is a common interest to learn about plant-microorganism interactions as well as microbial networks in the various plant organs and parts of root systems, in different types and depths of soils. We also welcome articles concerning changes in soil mycobiome composition and function under the influence of agricultural management practices, root exudates, exogenous organic matter and bioproducts. Root-microbe-soil response, especially rhizosphere mycobiome to climate change factors, soil carbon transformations and nutrient availability are also of great interest.

The first volume of our Frontiers in Microbiology article collection published 12 manuscripts, which together received over 12,388 article downloads and 70,000 views.

We do hope the second volume of Soil Fungal Biodiversity for Plant and Soil Health will get a similar or even greater success. We invite the scientific community of mycologists, microbiologists, biochemists, pedologists, agronomists, ecologists, bioinformaticians and numerous other branches of science jointly working on different aspects of the role of soil fungi in cultivated and wild natural stands.

Research Topic Research topic image

Keywords: soilborne fungi, detection of fungi, antifungal agents, plant health, microbiome, mycobiome, plant-microbes interactions, agroecology, biodiversity; rhizosphere fungal networks

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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