Soil Fungal Communities Across Contrasting Land-Use Systems in an Intensively Managed Cerrado Landscape

Understanding how agricultural soil management affects soil fungal communities is essential for assessing the resilience of biodiversity hotspots such as the Brazilian Cerrado. In this study, we characterized fungal community structure across three contrasting land-use systems within the same agricultural landscape: a native Cerrado remnant, a cover-cropping system, and a spatially isolated potato monoculture field. The soil's chemical and enzymatic characteristics differed from one another and were clustered by area. However, the same pattern was not observed for the fungal community. Alpha-diversity indices did not differ significantly among sites, although native Cerrado soils showed slightly higher richness and evenness. Beta-diversity analyses based on Bray-Curtis and Jaccard distances, supported by NMDS, ANOSIM, beta-dispersion, and PERMANOVA, indicated no significant compositional differences among communities. Core-mycobiota analysis identified 157 shared ASVs, including genera such as Fusarium, Cladosporium, Chrysosporium, Trichoderma, and Clonostachys. As a preliminary assessment based on a limited spatial design and sequencing-based inference, these findings should be interpreted with caution. These results underscore the need for further research on the mechanisms driving fungal dispersal, edge effects, and the long-term impacts of agricultural land-use on fungal diversity and ecological integrity in the Cerrado.