Growing evidence has shown that changes in landscape-level factors by accelerated land-use change can shape soil pathogenic fungal diversity. Researchers assessed how pathogenic fungal diversity in soil samples worldwide responds to landscape factors, including landscape complexity index based on eight landscape metrics and quantity of different land cover types across six spatial scales. They found that pathogenic fungal diversity increases with landscape complexity and crop cover proportion, but decreases with grass and tree cover proportion. Grassland ecosystems exhibit stronger responses to landscape variables compared to forest ecosystems. The results emphasize the importance of local factors and the complementary role of landscape patterns in shaping global soil pathogenic fungal distributions, highlighting scale-dependent effects across ecosystems and fungal functional groups.

Lu, Y., Eisenhauer, N., Patoine, G. et al. Landscape effects on global soil pathogenic fungal diversity across spatial scales. Nat Commun 17, 1164 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67929-5