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The importance of the plant mycorrhizal collaboration niche across scales

Nature Reviews Biodiversity volume 1, pages 262–273 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Mycorrhiza is a symbiotic association between plant root and fungus, contributing to plant mineral nutrition and defence against antagonists. The mycorrhizal collaboration niche characterizes the position of plant species along a gradient of reliance on mycorrhiza. In this Perspective, we introduce the plant mycorrhizal traits that describe these niches and explore upscaling them to describe community-scale and macroecological-scale structure, including relationships with ecosystem function. Plant mycorrhizal type, status, dependency and root colonization rate characterize mycorrhizal niche optima, whereas flexibility and variation of root colonization rate, indicating the plasticity of plants in their reliance on mycorrhiza, describe mycorrhizal niche width. Abundance-weighted community means of plant mycorrhizal traits offer a way of upscaling trait information and examining mycorrhizal niche structure across communities and biomes. An illustrative analysis indicated that the share of highly mycorrhiza-reliant plant species decreases in biomes of more recent biogeographic origin at high latitudes. Arbuscular mycorrhizal plants become less prevalent, and those remaining tend to be flexible. The highest overall flexibility is observed in anthropogenic semi-natural grasslands, whereas, contrastingly, natural grasslands exhibit low overall mycorrhizal flexibility. Further advances in the field will be underpinned by the development of standardized approaches for measuring mycorrhizal traits.

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Fig. 1: Plant mycorrhizal regulation scenarios.
Fig. 2: Mycorrhizal profiles of selected ecoregions.
Fig. 3: Innovations in plant mycorrhizal associations in conditions in which arbuscular mycorrhiza is inefficient.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for financial support by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (Centre of Excellence AgroCropFuture ‘Agroecology and new crops in future climates’, TK200) and the Estonian Research Council (PRG1065 & PRG2584) (M.M., J.D. and M.Z.), and Czech Science Foundation (22-06936S) (P.K.). The authors are grateful to M. Öpik and M. Lepik for useful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Mari Moora, John Davison & Martin Zobel

  2. Institute of Microbiology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Petr Kohout

  3. Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Petr Kohout

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  2. John Davison
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  3. Petr Kohout
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All authors contributed equally to all aspects of the article.

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Correspondence to Mari Moora.

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Glossary

Community mycorrhization flexibility

The overall potential mycorrhizal plasticity of the community, defined as the community-weighted mean of the standard deviation of the mycorrhizal colonization rate of the species.

Community mycorrhization rate

A proxy of the overall potential mycorrhizal dependence of the plant community, calculated as the community-weighted mean of the average mycorrhizal root colonization rate of the species.

Flexibility-specific mycorrhization

The share of plants that are flexible with respect to mycorrhiza in the community.

Fungal hyphae

Branching filamentous fungal structures in soil and plant roots that are involved in nutrient absorption and transport.

Mycorrhizal conservatism

High proportion of evolutionarily ancient mycorrhizal types and statuses.

Mycorrhizal dependency

The difference in plant growth between mycorrhizal and nonmycorrhizal treatments.

Mycorrhizal innovation

High proportion of evolutionarily recent mycorrhizal types and statuses.

Plant community mycorrhization

A proxy measure of the degree to which a plant community relies on mycorrhiza.

Resistance

The ability of a plant to reduce the performance of an antagonist.

Status-specific mycorrhization

The share of plants of a particular mycorrhizal status in the plant community.

Tolerance

The ability of a plant to recover from an antagonist.

Type-specific mycorrhization

The share of plants of a particular mycorrhizal type in the plant community.

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Moora, M., Davison, J., Kohout, P. et al. The importance of the plant mycorrhizal collaboration niche across scales. Nat. Rev. Biodivers. 1, 262–273 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00030-3

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