Generalists and Specialists Determine the Trend and Rate of Soil Fungal Distance Decay of Similarity in a 20-ha Subtropical Forest

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Soil microorganisms play important roles in nitrogen cycling within forest ecosystems. Microbial biodiversity positively relates to multifunctionality in terrestrial ecosystems and strongly influences key ecological processes that are important for the future of our society. This is the reason why microbial ecologists have been struggling during the last decades to describe the diversity of microorganisms in the environment, especially in soils, and to identify the drivers of microbial community structure and functionality. The plant functional groups from above-ground communities can influence below-ground communities and vice versa; this two-way interaction must be considered an important driver of plant diversity and productivity in terrestrial systems. Tropical forests are characterized by relatively high precipitation, low annual temperature fluctuation, high heterogeneity in plant diversity, large amounts of plant litter, and unique soil chemistry. For these reasons, the regulation of the nitrogen cycle in tropical forests may be very different from that of temperate ecosystems. This is of great importance because of growing concerns regarding the effect of land-use change and chronic-elevated nitrogen deposition on nitrogen cycling processes in tropical forests. In the context of global change, it is crucial to understand how environmental factors and land-use changes in tropical ecosystems influence the composition, abundance and activity of key players in the nitrogen cycle.

In this study, the authors through removing operational taxonomic units (OTU) with low or high frequencies rigorously quantified the impact of specialists or generalists on the change of slope, initial similarity and halving distance of DDS of soil undefined saprotroph, plant mutualist and pathogen communities in forest plot in Yunnan Province (Southwest China).

This manuscript is generally well written, logically structured, well-illustrated and easy to understand. It also addresses a subject of great interest in the scientific community. The title clearly describes the contents of the paper. The abstract is well written. The introduction is well written as it gives a good background of the research in question. I believe that the Materials and Methods section is well structured and scientifically sound. The results are well presented, figures are correct. However, the final part of the discussion needs to be supplemented.

Suggestions:

Replace  “Com-munities of fungi associated with plants can vary in composition or function when environments change, which has implications for fungal contributions to plant resilience [21]. with Communities of fungi associated with plants can vary in composition or function when environments change, which has implications for fungal contributions to plant resilience [21].

Replace “community assembly mechanism in soil mi-crobes.” with “community assembly mechanism in soil microbes.”

Replace: “The relative contribu-tion by vegetation, soil, space” with “The relative contribution by vegetation, soil, space…”

Latin names of taxa should be italicized. Modify as: “…subtropical oak species Lithocarpus hancei, L. xylocarpus, Castanopsis wattii and Schima noronhae.”

Discussion: In my opinion, the discussion should include several names of species belonging to Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, which play a key role in tropical forest ecosystems. Maybe the authors know such publications? - they are worth citing. This would greatly increase the scientific value of this article.

Chapter 4.2. Please remove the hyphen in words: special-ists, biodi-versity, dis-tance, gen-eral, re-moval, general-ists, geograph-ic, etc.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, I have read with interest the manuscript entitled "Generalists and specialists determine the trend and rate of soil fungal distance-decay of similarity in a 20-ha subtropical forest". I consider the study very interesting and the hypotheses proposed very innovative.

General comments - Avoid using "we", "our" etc. Make the text impersonal. Also, where is the case, avoid long sentences. It is a good idea to split them in half.

Pay attention to the words, to be correct - like spe-cialist (in the abstract) and ef-fects in introduction.

Do not repeat the same idea - e.g. The contribution of generalists and specialists in shaping DDS has been poorly investigated. (you mention this already 2-3 lines above)

The introduction is well written. I suggest you to modify the last paragraph

To address the effects of specialists and generalists on DDS of multiple fungal guilds, we soil samples were from a subtropical evergreen forest in Southwest China and identified soil fungal communities by sequencing the ITS2 region of fungi.

Mat and Meth section - I like the quantity of information. One minor suggestion - change the letters from formulas in italic, otherwise they will look mixed with the text.

where d0.5 denotes the halving distance [41]. Eq. 2 does not depend on d itself, but only on the increase in d.

Results section - this section need to be expanded. You have a lot of interesting results and they should be presented. Expand each subsection. It will help you to make a good discussion section.

Discussion section - this section is well written. I suggest you to remove the reference to a previous figure from this section. Or move that part to results section. 

halving distance of DDS (Fig-ures 4a-c), could be influenced

diversity rather than nestedness (Figure 4), in-dicating

Conclusion. Point each of your findings in this section. Add species, values. You have a lot of good results, present the most important one.

Overall, I like the idea of research, I like the presentation and the construction of the article.

 

 

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

I appreciate the effort and idea of the authors. They present an interesting and very complex study.

I like the structure of the article, the methodology that sustain the research carried out by the authors.

Minor suggestions - pat attention to the words separated by "-" within the text. Make the results section longer. Add a few more sentences to each of the Results sub-sections.

Rewrite the Conclusion section in order to point each of your main findings in a separate sentence. Add values to conclusion. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, your manuscript looks very good in this form. 

I want to congratulate you for this work.