Underground Explorers

Cliffs are extreme environments that hold unique and diverse plant communities with a great ability to adapt to their particular severe conditions. Cliffs hold specialist plant species, many of them being endemic and threatened plant species. Mutualistic interactions with mycorrhizal fungi may favor their adaptation, as they can ameliorate plants toward biotic stress mitigation or efficient water nutrient acquisition. Moreover, considering the potential specific selectivity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) to cliff plant hosts, the cliff mycorrhizal community may be unique. However, these questions remain largely unexplored. An in-depth understanding of cliff microbiota and their distinctive and specific interactions with cliff plants is key to understanding this unexplored system. Considering all this, we hypothesize that: H1.-Cliff-specialist plants hold specific mycorrhizal communities that favour their adaptation to cliffs environments. H2.-Generalist species inhabiting cliffs form different mycorrhizal symbioses than the same species growing on a horizontal stratum in the vicinity of the cliff.