Yuanliu Hu, a PhD student at the Research Center for Ecological and Environmental Sciences, South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, under the supervision of researcher Qi Deng, has made progress in the study of mycorrhizal fungi to mitigate phosphorus limitation caused by acidification. The related research was published in Global Change Biology. Yuanliu Hu is the first author of the paper, and Qi Deng is the corresponding author.

Acid rain remains a widespread global environmental problem. In recent decades, acid deposition has continued to rise in southern China, leading to increasingly severe soil acidification, which is likely to exacerbate phosphorus limitation in regional forest ecosystems.

Based on a 10-year field experiment simulating acid deposition in a monsoonal evergreen broadleaf forest in Dinghu Mountain, researchers found that soil acidification increases the activation of exchange Al3+ and Fe3+ and iron oxides, driving the conversion of unstable phosphorus pools to closed pools, thereby reducing soil phosphorus effectiveness; however, soil soluble phosphorus and unstable organic phosphorus pools can remain unchanged during the rainy season. This is mainly due to the increase of ectomycorrhizal fungi by acid deposition, which may promote the solubilization of closed-state soil phosphorus, and then accelerate soil organic phosphorus mineralization by stimulating phosphatase activity.

This study reveals that southern subtropical forest ecosystems can mitigate phosphorus limitation caused by soil acidification through seasonal stimulation of plant-microbe interactions.

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