Soil-borne fungi are considered important drivers of plant community structure, diversity and ecosystem process in terrestrial ecosystems. Yet, our understanding of their identity and belowground association with different plant species in natural ecosystems such as grasslands is limited.

We identified the soil-borne fungal communities in the roots of a range of plant species representing the main families occurring in natural grasslands using next generation sequencing of the ITS1 region, alongside FUNGuild and a literature review to determine the ecological role of the fungal taxa detected. Our results show clear differences in the total and the pathogenic soil-borne fungal communities between the two main plant functional groups in grasslands (grasses and forbs) and between species within both functional groups, which could to a large extent be explained by plant phylogenetic structure. In addition, our results show that drought can increase the relative abundance of pathogenic fungi.

These findings on a range of plant species provide a baseline for future studies revealing the importance of belowground plant-fungal interactions in diverse natural grasslands.

土壤传播的真菌被认为是陆地生态系统植物群落结构，多样性和生态系统过程的重要驱动力。但是，我们对它们的身份以及与诸如草地之类的自然生态系统中不同植物物种的地下联系的理解是有限的。

我们使用ITS1区域的下一代测序技术，在FUNGuild的下一代测序基础上，鉴定了代表天然草原主要家庭的一系列植物物种根系中的土壤传播真菌群落，并结合FUNGuild进行了文献综述，以确定检测到的真菌类群的生态作用。 。我们的结果表明，草地的两个主要植物功能组（草和福布斯）之间以及两个功能组内的物种之间，在总的和致病的土壤传播真菌群落上存在明显差异，这在很大程度上可以用植物的系统发育结构来解释。 。此外，我们的结果表明干旱可以增加病原真菌的相对丰度。

这些对一系列植物物种的发现为将来的研究提供了基线，揭示了地下植物与真菌相互作用在各种天然草地中的重要性。