Jessica Wallace, Isabelle Laforest-Lapointe, Steven W. Kembel - PeerJ - August 14, 2018
In this study, we quantified the microbial communities of the leaves and roots of seedlings of the deciduous tree species sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marshall) within its natural range and at the species’ elevational range limit at Mont-Mégantic, Quebec ... The bacterial and fungal communities of A. saccharum seedlings differ across elevational range limits for all four plant compartments. Distinct microbial communities colonize each compartment, although the microbial communities inside a plant’s structure (endophytes) were found to be a subset of the communities found outside the plant’s structure (epiphytes) ... These findings provide a greater understanding of the ecological processes driving the structure and diversity of plant-associated microbial communities within and at the edge of a plant species range, and suggest the potential for biotic interactions between plants and their associated microbiota to influence the dynamics of plant range edge boundaries and responses to global change.
