Landscape effects on global soil pathogenic fungal diversity across spatial scales

Growing evidence has shown that, apart from local environmental factors, changes in landscape-level factors by accelerated land-use change can also shape soil pathogenic fungal diversity. However, the global representativeness of such patterns remains unclear. Here, we assess how pathogenic fungal diversity in 511 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 (i.e., surrounding landscape, 250 m to 10,000 m radii from the sampling coordinate). We find that while soil variables explain over half of the variance, pathogenic fungal alpha diversity increases with landscape complexity and crop cover proportion, but decreases with grass and tree cover proportion, together explaining 23.4% of the total variance. Landscape factors have weaker impacts on beta diversity, explaining 13.0% of the variance. Across spatial scales, grassland ecosystems exhibit increasingly stronger responses to landscape variables compared to forest ecosystems. Landscape factors have a higher relative contribution to root-associated fungi than leaf/fruit/seed-associated fungi. Our 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.