Abstract:

The diversity of soil fungi communities is an important basis for evaluating the environmental quality and health of tea gardens. Soils from representative ancient tea mountain forests, modern tea gardens and ancient tea gardens were studied by using Illumina platform Hiseq 2500 high-throughput sequencing technology to analyze 18S rDNA of fungi. And combined with soil nutrient level analysis, we explored the correlation of soil fungi community diversity with nutrient status. The results show that the relative abundance of the five phyla of Ascomycetes, Basidiomycetes, Zygomycetes, Chytridiomycota and Glomeromycotina account for 97.17%-99.67% of the fungi community. Cryptococcus, Archaeorhizomyces and Mortierella are widely distributed in forest and tea garden soils. The diversity and abundance of soil fungi communities have significantly higher correlations with soil pH, C:N and Olsen-P than that of organic matter, alkali-hydrolyzable nitrogen and available potassium; the numbers and diversity of fungi in tea garden soil are better than that of forest soil; at the optimal classification level, the abundances of forest soil dominant communities such as Hannaella, Trichoderma, Alternaria, Herbrichiellaceae, Russula, Membranomyces, Gliocladiopsis, Penicillium, etc. are significantly and positively correlated with the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in soil. Tea garden soil dominant communities: Cryptococcus, Archaeorhizomyces, Fusarium, Exophiala, Mortierella and Metarhizium are significantly and positively correlated with soil pH, organic matter, alkali hydrolyzable nitrogen, available potassium and Olsen-P. This study reveals the close relationship between the plantation and cultivated age of tea plant, the soil pH of different tea mountains, and the nutrient status of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium with the fungi community structure and diversity of tea garden soils.

Key words: tea garden soil, fungi community, high-throughput sequencing, soil nutrients, redundancy analysis