Responses of soil fungal communities and functional guilds to ~160 years of natural revegetation in the Loess Plateau of China.

Natural revegetation has been widely confirmed to be an effective strategy for the restoration of degraded lands, particularly in terms of rehabilitating ecosystem productivity and soil nutrients. Yet the mechanisms of how natural revegetation influences the variabilities and drivers of soil residing fungal communities, and its downstream effects on ecosystem nutrient cycling are not well understood. For this study, we investigated changes in soil fungal communities along with ~160 years of natural revegetation in the Loess Plateau of China, employing Illumina MiSeq DNA sequencing analyses.