Mycorrhizal Associations in Agroforestry Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Agroforestry systems are a set of land use systems in which perennial woody species (e.g., trees and shrubs) are deliberately conserved in association with crops (e.g., annual crops) and/or livestock as a part of a spatial dispersed arrangement, in which there are both ecological and economic interactions between the woody plants and the other components that provide important ecosystem services. Among the interactions that occur in the soil of agroforestry systems, those between trees and microbiota, especially between roots and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), are particularly significant. These AMF provide ecosystem services in agroforestry, such as increased nutrient absorption by expanding the volume of soil that can be explored by the host plants, soil stability, crop plant tolerance against abiotic and biotic stresses, plant diversity, and plant productivity and quality for human health. Two of the main strategies to manage mycorrhizas in agroforestry systems are the introduction of a nurse plant to maintain soil mycorrhizal potential and mycorrhizal inoculation with a particular fungal strain to increase plant growth. Agroforestry systems have also the potential to mitigate competition for resources between nitrogen-fixing trees and annual crops by interconnecting them through a common mycorrhizal network (CMN) that can mediate the transfer of nitrogen from the former to the latter. Molecular tools have considerably improved the possibility to identify CMN and monitor AMF inocula in agroforestry systems, but quick and reliable tests for evaluating their functionality are still lacking.

Prof. Amadou Moustapha Bâ
Guest Editor

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• mycorrhizae
• symbiotic nitrogen fixation
• soil mycorrhizal potential
• inoculation
• nutrient transfer
• 15N natural abundance
• 15N isotopic dilution
• common mycorrhizal networks
• next-generation sequencing