Figures and table legends
Figure 1. The Kungsängen Nature Reserve field site is located a) south of the city of Uppsala, in central Sweden (red circle). b) It is part of a large meadow on the east side of the Fyris river, a green line indicating reserve borders. Red dots indicate soil sampling locations on either side of the soil moisture transition border (red line) intersecting two permanent plant community transects T1 and T4 (dashed lines). Map source: © Lantmäteriet, i2012/921.
Figure 2. Non-metric multidimensional scaling ordination (nMDS) of the plant community in plots along transect T1 (plots 1-28, red) and T4 (plots 61-76 blue). Ellipses outline the distribution of plots from the wet part (green) and mesic-dry part (black). Plots 75 and 76 are on the levee close to the river with somewhat deviating vegetation. The closest plots to the locations for soil microbiome sampling (enclosed by dashed ellipses) on the mesic-dry side were plots 14-16 (T1) and 67-68 (T4) and on the wet side plots 17-18 (T1) and 69 (T4).
Figure 3 . Non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) ordination of microeukaryotic communities recovered from wet (green) and mesic-dry (red) soil moisture regimes at the Kungsängen Nature Reserve using Bray-Curtis dissimilarities calculated from relative abundance based on three different OTU inference methods a) OTU_A, b) OTU_S and c) OTU_C. Closed circles are samples with a F. meleagris plant and open triangles are samples without F. meleagris plant
Figure 4. Phylum-level taxonomic assignments of microeukaryotic communities in wet and mesic-dry soil moisture regimes separated into (A) protists and (B) Fungi. Illustrated as mean fractional read abundance for the three occurrence tables OTU_A, OTU_C and OTU_S. Phyla which represent less than 1.5% of total reads are grouped together as “other”.
Figure 5. Species richness curve estimated from the bottom up as SH_99, SH_97 and GH_90, based on all reads combined for ten samples each from mesic-dry and wet soil moisture regies. OTUs were inferred using three different clustering methods: OTU_A (green), OTU_C (orange) and OTU_S (purple) and the ITS2 region of their representative sequences were then clustered into species and genus hypotheses (SH and GH), using three different ITS2 sequence similarity thresholds 99% for SH_99, 97% for SH_97 and 90% for GH_90.
Table 1. Number of inferred OTUs and the number of reads represented, for total microeukaryotic community and (fungi), for the three different clustering methods.
Table 2. OTU sequences, were clustered across the ITS2 region, to represent taxa at different taxonomic ranks genus (GH_90) and species (SH_97 and SH_99), number of clusters and % of these including sequences from the three OTU inference methods.